“Whatever you do, stay in the room.” So advises Ron Carlson in his book on the craft of writing, appropriately titled Ron Carlson Writes a Story. He knows what world exists on the other side of the door: a world full of televised sports, dirty dishes, iced mochachinos. A world full of distraction from the task at hand. Writing, he argues, is about staying in the room, pushing beyond the point where your eyes glaze over and your fingers refuse to type. That’s where the magic lies.

The first time I encountered a Ron Carlson book, I was a few weeks into my first real job, trying to convince a bunch of high school students that, Of course, The Old Man and the Sea relates to your experiences. You’ve been alive, what, fifteen years? Isn’t Santiago’s grand struggle against the unstoppable approach of death totally obvious to you? A friend of mine had mentioned Carlson’s name, said I might like his stuff. I was spending my Saturdays at The Boston Public Library in Copley Square, grading papers and roaming the stacks, as if somewhere amidst the million books I would find the answer for what I wanted to do with my life. That’s when I plucked Ron Carlson’s The News of the World from the shelf.

Here, at last, were stories I wanted to tell: a father covers his roof in horse manure in order to sustain the myth of Santa Claus; a man is haunted by the faces of missing children staring out from his milk cartons; a husband (whose wife’s name is Story!) drops a basketball in the middle of a lake, then attempts to swim to it in the dark, an act that recreates a sperm’s journey, a ritual intended to remedy his wife’s infertility. The collection even included a story about Donkey Kong! I knew then that I would continue to teach—I had to pay back some loans. But I would write, too. Ron Carlson had given me permission to tell my stories.

So I was particularly excited when I heard that Carlson would be traveling to Ann Arbor in February to read at the University of Michigan as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series. And I was even more excited to have the opportunity to speak with Carlson during his trip. Like his stories, he has a sly humor that is tempered by his seriousness about the craft of fiction. He speaks like someone you know: your father, your teacher, your coach. He tells jokes, shares advice. At dinner he orders sloppy joes and root beer. He makes you want to stay in the room.

Ron Carlson is the author of four story collections and five novels, including The Signal, which was just released in paperback in June. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. His stories and monologues have been featured on NPR’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. Last year he received the Aspen Prize for Literature, an honor previously bestowed on Salman Rushdie. He now lives near Los Angeles and directs the creative writing program at the University of California – Irvine.

Interview:

You’ve been teaching in one capacity or another for forty years. Do you see yourself more as a teacher or a writer, or have the two become so connected that you don’t really separate them in your head?

They have become inextricable, but I was a writer first. I was a young guy, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five-years-old, who stubbornly taught against the grain. I knew other people who thought that way. You paid the bills with teaching and you wrote, but what happened to me is I went to teach at a prep school. I came out of a big public school in Utah, but I ended up in this all-male prep school in Connecticut [The Hotchkiss School] where I got captured by the men. It was bizarre. I was newly married, twenty-three-years-old, and I ran into these master teachers, these guys who had given their lives over to teaching. It wasn’t like you went home, because you lived at school. It was hard—the preparations were exhausting, and then I had to run a dorm with twenty boys on my floor. Crazy times. I’ll write a novel about that some time.

For example, I couldn’t skate but I ended up coaching the hockey team. We also had Saturday classes. For ten years, I taught grammar to sophomores on Saturday mornings, and I liked it. I became a guy who saw where the leverage was. I was energetic, so I learned how to teach, and I learned how to write underneath it. In my third year, I told the department chair that I quit because I wasn’t writing my book, and he said something ridiculous, he said, “To hell with it, take the spring off, we’ll pay you for the spring, and you don’t have to come back.” He saw the big picture. He said, “You’ve got to be a teacher, but you need to get this out of your system so go.”

So I went to Mexico in March and finished my book [Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald]. I called the school in August and said, “I’m coming back.” I served seven more years and loved it. I wrote my second novel at Hotchkiss, one page at a time. Class ended at 12:40pm, I had hockey practice at 1:30, and I would write in the spaces between. I was a teacher who wrote some books. I was never more alive. I’ve never had two years off to just write. If I hadn’t been a teacher, I’d maybe have four more books. But I would have let all the books go in order to teach.

Going back to those years in the classroom and those boys on Saturday mornings, what literature did you enjoy teaching?

There wasn’t much experimentation. You didn’t bring in anything new. I spent ten years reading and learning to love everything I should have read in college—all the Victorians, all the Romantic poets. It fed me in a way that I couldn’t tell you. We read The Odyssey every year. Moby Dick. Then you bring it up to Death of a Salesman, Gatsby. Winesburg, Ohio was particularly poignant in a prep school setting.

What is it like to reach a point in your career where your own books have become part of some schools’ required reading?

Well, it advances the discussion. Now that people have read my work, it’s a privilege. And it’s always a bit of a surprise because everybody knows more about you than you’re used to.

Supposing that you aren’t the author for a minute, are there any Ron Carlson stories you’d enjoy teaching or sharing with students?

I’m teaching a graduate class this winter called “Forty Stories and One Poem.” That course is oriented on the question “How was that story made?” I’m only interested in how the story was made. Yeah, it bleeds out, and people are going “Wow,” but I say, “Hold the ‘wow.’ I don’t care about the ‘wow.’”  Where does the story start? How does the writer move back? What’s the transition? I’m all nuts and bolts and craft, and I love to share my stories that way. I’d love people to read “Blazo” [from Plan B for the Middle Class] that way or the stories in At the Jim Bridger. I’ve been to a lot of reading groups where people have read my novels, and that’s illuminating. I rarely talk as a writer. I’m always talking as a teacher.

Can you recall a book from your youth that brought you to writing, not necessarily one that made you say, “I want to be a writer,” but “This is the kind of writing I want to do”?

Someone just gave me Robert Stone’s book of stories Fun with Problems, and I read the first paragraph and I put it down and went to write. So Stone, and Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano. That book is uneven, but even at its low points it’s higher than anybody else.

What I try to do as a teacher, and what I loved as a young writer, is seeing what is possible. When I think of my influences, I think of Richard Brautigan. I think of Ionesco. I think of Cheever. There’s something lovely about being brutally sincere. Simple honesty. Hemingway was a powerful influence when I was in college, but you’ve got to be careful when reading Hemingway. You can’t read him too early. You should really hold the Hemingway until you’re twenty-five. There are also parts of Fitzgerald that I read in college that still get me, passages where he lets go: the center sections of his story “May Day” and  “The Sensible Thing.” That’s where I began to see the viable connection between language and emotion.

In terms of your own writing, you’ve said that the key to success is “surviving the draft,” a process you’ve equated to a refusal to drown. Do you have any tips for those of us out there in the water?

They say that teaching creative writing is a series of offering tips, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think the way forward is always remembering why you wanted it, why you wanted to write. You’ve also got to marry yourself to subjects that have your total attention. That’s so easy to say. It’s like saying, “Find the right person to marry.” But success lies in this 100 percent commitment, even when the writing feels comical or odd. Your desire allows you to stay with the project, allows you to stay in the dark, to survive in the dark. If you’re always in the light when you’re writing a story, it’s probably not a story I’d care to read. One of the reasons we continue this very delicious mystery of talking about creative writing is that you can’t learn about the dark by turning on the lights. Everybody has to go off into the dark. And the reason we’re doing it is not for glory, but for our love of our material. That’s the cornerstone.

You’ve described the stories in your first collection, The News of the World, published in 1989, as “wishful,” and you’ve said that when writing them your imagination “took a sunny turn.” About ten years after that book’s publication, you gave an interview in which you said, “I’m a nice guy, but that’s an impulse I’m slowly conquering.” How is that working out for you?

What you want as a writer is to earn your turns, to earn all the changes. Even when I was in my “sunny” stage, there’s a lot of rube in my stories. If you write a lot, you’ll see that you weren’t even aware that you were writing about the person you would become or the person you had been. A writer has to play with a full deck. You can’t just play with the face cards. You have to reach. A writer’s progress isn’t linear. You don’t go two, four, six, eight. Now I think there’s a clear light and a clear shadow in my work. That’s what you want. Readers are smart, and they want to be taken seriously. They don’t want a gratuitous nod at the good and the bad. I’ve never tried to do that. So-called “happy endings” are very difficult. I don’t even know what a happy ending is. But a dark ending can also be facile in a literary sense. You know, “Cheryl would never be the same again.”  Really? I’m not so sure.

The best writing is recording. We begin with what we know, and we move toward what we don’t. I think that’s fiction’s role. The life I’ve led wants me to be an optimist, but that’s my life. It doesn’t mean I can turn the music up at the ending of every story. I know about craft choices. I know how stories function. What we’re looking for at all times is honesty presented in language so that we can see the world again. Can you surprise me again with something I already know? It’s more important to be real than nice or bad.

You spent a lot of time in your four story collections writing about domestic life: families, husbands, wives, suburbia. Your last two novels in many ways are books without roofs. In other words, they’re stories that take place almost exclusively outdoors with people sleeping in tents, under the stars. Why do you think you’ve gone in this direction as a writer?

I don’t know. I wanted to write a book about work, and that’s Five Skies. I did some temporary work at a fair once where we put up seating and took it down and put up fences and took them down. It was bizarre. So I wrote a page of dialogue, and I’d been reading Rick Bass, and one character asks another, “Did you ever make anything that lasted?” And then I wrote a section about a truck sliding through a snow fence, and it was visceral. I could feel that. About halfway through I saw the real arc of the story, and I freaked out. I called my editor and said, “You’ve got to understand, this book, there aren’t any women in it, and it’s all out of doors, and it’s in the West, and it’s about work. It’s not going to fit.” And he said, “Go. Go nuts.” So I wrote the book, and I was very happy with its reception.

In fact, last year, Five Skies followed best-selling novels such as The Kite Runner and The Secret Life of Bees as the “state book” for the Read Across Rhode Island program. How were you involved in the events surrounding this program?

First of all, those people are the sweetest people of all time. Whenever you go somewhere and meet readers in a room, those are special people. I went to Rhode Island twice for events and it was a dream. We had so much fun. At one of the colleges they had a lecture, and somebody analyzed the book, and somebody cooked all the food from the book, and they acted out a chapter. They were nuts. Then I went to a breakfast later in the year—maybe five hundred people—and some of my old students were there. One guy was in his fifties, he’s a surgeon, and he had skated for me at Hotchkiss.

Does it help with your future projects to think back on the anxiety you felt while writing Five Skies now that it has been so well received?

Yes. That’s why it’s better to remember that you’re only as good as your thinking. In the current world with all the noise, the Internet, and so on, it can be problematic for writers. A lot of things want to divide you. People should talk about that more. A writer can’t multi-task. Multi-tasking is like saying, “I quit.” It’s a phrase people use to explain why they’re doing two things poorly. Both of my last books were received well and got some recognition, but that has nothing to do with what’s next. It’s like flipping a coin. You can stare at that tails for an hour, and it won’t affect what happens next. I’m trying to stay calm about the book I’m writing now because it’s kind of flat, but that’s going to be the way it is. There’s nothing particularly sexy about this next book and that’s OK.

That’s interesting because a lot of people reacted to The Signal by labeling it a thriller. Do you see the book that way or is that description too limiting?

It’s very difficult. I have trouble saying what a book is. I say The Signal is a backpacking book, and that’s good for me. I made a decision while writing The Signal that I was going to add some voltage, so I put in some higher profile plot points. It was a really interesting decision when I realized there’d be firearms. I didn’t want it to just be two characters in the woods. I wanted other issues, so I used what I know about writing to make the rest of it have a purchase in credibility. So, yeah, I pumped it up at the end. If it was my only book ever, I might not have done that. But then I thought, “Come on, you’re going to write more books, so let’s put it in.” There was something fun about it. When you tie a knot like that, and then untie it, it’s a kind of pleasure.

Let me throw a Ron Carlson quote at you as a way to address your writing process. You said, “I’m not going to wait for eight months of free time to write a great big book. That would be like a snake eating a pig. I want to nibble. I want to eat every day.” Still nibbling?

Absolutely. On the best days, I can get ninety minutes or 700 words. You use whatever ritual you can find. You push. I’ve written some stories five sentences a day for a hundred days. A lot of days I’d stop in the middle of a word. I’d know how to pick up, because I knew how to spell. But during my busiest times at school, I have to keep myself alive with blips, maybe only two days a week. Ultimately, the goal is to be working more days of the week than not.

I’d like to ask about the ways that your love of movies has influenced or hovered in the background of much of your writing. A number of your characters are connected to Hollywood in some way, either as professionals or as movie-lovers, and several of your works include epigraphs that are from films. What kinds of movies interest you, and how has your appreciation for on-screen stories affected your writing?

In my formative years, movies were something you saw rarely. You saw them once, or if they were on TV, you made sure to watch. I loved horror movies and all the old science fiction. It was the 1950s, so we had It Came From Beneath the Sea, and all that stuff got me. It still does, because that’s what I rent on Netflix. It’s pathetic. Someone will come over and I’ll say, “You want to see the octopus that attacked San Francisco?”

Really, all culture has affected my writing. Songs, stories, especially ballads, Western ballads. I grew up in a time when we had a monolithic culture. We all had the same twenty references in television, in movies, in song. And now there’s such a multiplicity, such huge diversity.

In a long-ago interview you mentioned that you were working on a screenplay for your story “Life Before Science.” Then, in 2008, your story “Keith” was made into a movie. Many readers have also suggested that Five Skies and The Signal would translate well to the screen. Do you see more Hollywood in your future?

All my work is under option, and I wish them the best, but I’m not following it. There’s one piece I have that I’d like to write the screenplay: my story “Beanball.”  I did write a screenplay for my novel The Speed of Light and there are inquiries about that every few years. Really, film is just a windfall. When someone buys the rights to your book, you’ve got to let go. My plate’s full with teaching. If I was worried about money, I might go scrambling, but I’ve been blessed not to do that. I never had to write anything for money because I had a job and that allowed me to write crazily. I had to write and not let my students know what I was writing. And I’ve been lucky. I’ve published just about everything I ever wrote. So, no, I don’t plan on doing anything in particular for the movies. I would much rather spend the day at my house having a pot of coffee, having gotten in my six hundred words. Maybe go to the post office on my bike, call a friend, write for a bonus hour. That really is the center of my life.

Further Links and Resources:

• Read Ron Carlson’s story “At Copper View,” which was originally published in Five Points Vol. V, No. 1. This story was collected in At the Jim Bridger. It was also one of fifty stories short-listed for a 2001 O. Henry Prize.
• You can also read Carlson’s introduction to the Fall 2006 issue of Ploughshares, in which he discusses what makes a good story.
• Here is a 2009 interview with Carlson from the New West website where he discusses his new novel, The Signal.
• Listen to an audio version of Carlson’s Christmas story “The H Street Sledding Record.”
• Ron Carlson describes teaching as “an act of investigation,” much like the process of writing itself, in this brief clip about teaching in the UC-Irvine writing program:
• Here is an interview with Ron Carlson from UC-Irvine’s 2009 Literary Orange Festival:
• Watch The Gold Lunch, a short film by Joanna Kerns adapted from Ron Carlson’s story:

photo credit: Philip Chaon

Reading Dan Chaon’s latest novel, Await Your Reply, we may not trust the identity-shifting protagonists as they flee and reconstruct new selves, but we always trust Chaon to guide us through the mysteries of who these characters will become. The book maintains its humor and humanity despite severed limbs, questionable mental health, Russian mobsters, and Psycho-like accommodations. Chaon’s work has always shown a fascination with what he used to call, in workshops at Oberlin College (where I had the good fortune of being his student), the “spooky” side of life: ghosts and unanswered questions, disappearances and visions, but also the stranger echoes of our own human chambers and relationships. While his stories often hinge on the morbid and unusual, readers don’t have to work hard to suspend disbelief; ultimately, Chaon’s work doesn’t strive to show us the freakishness of his characters’ worlds, but the familiarity of them.

Await Your Reply has been named one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, Salon.com, and the American Library Association, among others. Chaon is also the author of the novel You Remind Me of Me, which was nominated for a National Book Award, and the story collections Fitting Ends and Among the Missing. He is a beloved teacher at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

This interview was conducted over email in March and April of 2010.

Interview

DANIELLE LAZARIN: Await Your Reply hinges on lots of small mysteries, which slowly get solved, but which also often open up into larger mysteries. The book has a lot of resolution, and the reader feels very sated, and yet you still, in typical Chaon style, leave plenty of questions for the reader to answer on their own. You seem more comfortable than a lot of writers with the unknown; I’m thinking in particular here, of the endings of the title stories of your collections Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, both of which refuse to answer mysteries that the characters themselves cannot solve. 
How did you, as a writer, become comfortable with leaving questions unanswered in your stories?

DAN CHAON: My fascination with unanswered questions started early on. As a kid, I loved ghost stories, unsolved mysteries, unexplained phenomenon. I also had a soft spot for the boy detective genre of children’s fiction—Hardy Boys, The Three Investigators, etc.—but I always felt disappointed by the resolution. One of the first pieces of fiction I wrote was a series of stories about a boy who investigated mysterious events which could never be solved. This was when I was about ten or eleven, and already I felt this weird resistance to the concept of closure.

Later, when I was in college, I remember being drawn to the famous Freud essay “The Uncanny,” in which he talks about the concept of unheimlich. His general thesis is that the uncanny is anything we experience in adulthood that reminds us of earlier psychic stages, aspects of our unconscious life, the primitive experience of the human species, etc. Those moments when we draw close to a feeling of helpless unknowing, when we sense secrets that won’t reveal themselves, the way we do in early childhood.

For some reason, this reminded me of discussions we were having in my English class about “epiphany,” —I was taking a Joyce class at the time—and there was this essay by Robert Scholes, “Epiphanies and Epicleti” which is contained in the Viking Critical Library edition of Dubliners. Scholes calls an “epiphany” “a moment in which things or people in the world revealed their true character or their essence.” In Stephen Hero, Joyce calls the moment of epiphany “a sudden spiritual manifestation.”

In any case, it’s not an idea that Joyce can take full credit for. In Greek drama “epiphany” refers to the moment when a god appears and imposes order on the scene before him. I suppose you could say that. In any case, the idea of epiphany has a lot to do with the notion of seeing and not seeing; or as they sing in “Amazing Grace,” I once was blind, but now I see.

In more contemporary fiction, that idea of epiphany, moment of being, “imposed order,” etc. is often based on metaphorical connections between “secular” moments/objects and “spiritual” insight. A few famous examples might be the wonderfully rococo description of Jazz music at the end of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”; or, much simpler and more understated, the drawing of the cathedral in Carver’s “Cathedral” and the single paragraph, which I still find incredibly moving:

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.

The term epiclitus also comes from the Greek, and according to Scholes, it means, “summoned before a court,” or “accused.” Scholes says: “Thus, the epicleti may be considered the accused, summoned up by Joyce to stand trial as specimens of Irish paralysis.” In other words, Scholes says, an epiclitus is an moment in which a character fails to have a revelation, is left trapped, unable to change or escape from the mundane world. Note, that there’s almost always a sense of indictment to this kind of ending: social—spiritual—existential failure.

So almost all of Beckett’s work leads toward this end, and the absurdists, and Blanche Dubois’s “depending on the kindness of strangers,” and some of Cheever’s darker stuff, like “The Swimmer.” (Some would argue that the end of “The Country Husband” is a clueless, epiclitus ending narrated as if it’s an epiphany…)

Katherine Mansfield

Anyway, I’ve often thought that “epiclitus” doesn’t necessarily have to be an indictment. One of the cleanest examples of epiclitus in 20th-century short stories is Katherine Mansfield’s wonderful, “Daughters of the Late Colonel,” and it’s also very moving and beautiful. Here’s a moment in which the two spinster sisters edge close to a moment of insight:

“It was only when she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight or by the sea or into a thunderstorm that she really felt herself. What did it mean? What was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to? Now? Now? She turned away from the Buddha with one of her vague gestures. She went over to where Josephine was standing. She wanted to say something to Josephine, something frightfully important–about the future and what…”

But then it’s gone before she can grasp it, and the story ends with this exchange:

“I can’t say what I was going to say, because I’ve forgotten what it was…that I was going to say.”

Josephine was silent for a moment. She stared at a big cloud where the sun had been. Then she replied shortly, “I’ve forgotten too.”

Anyway, basically the two terms are flipsides of the same idea–the notion that there is some state of revelation, insight into mystery, moment of being, or what-have-you which is either grasped (epiphany) or lost (epiclitus). We (the readers) often pity or feel slightly superior to those who don’t get their epiphanies. It’s frequently presented ironically.

And yet…as for me, I guess I’ve always felt personally and emotionally closer to the searchers, rather than to the finders…to those who don’t get answers, as opposed to those who do. For me, the experience of epiclitus is closely related to the experience of the uncanny, but also to the experience of complex and problematic emotions, like yearning, and awe, and psychic unease, which are of particular interest to me. That precipice of endless uncertainty, of the impenetrable—those are the moments that I’ve always loved in literature, as well as the moments that have haunted me in life.

I’ve read and heard many times over that McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, in which your story, “The Bees,” appeared in 2003, ushered in a new era of genre-bending in “literary” fiction. Do you think it’s at all true that books like Kelly Link’s story collections, or Lauren Groff’s Monsters of Templeton, for example, might not have fared as well say 10 or 15 years ago? Do you think the reading public’s openness and acceptance to a more fantastic kind of story within the literary really began in the past decade or so?

Not exactly. I think there was a certain period of American Literature—maybe about fifty years, 1950-2000, let’s say—where “realism” and “literary” were more or less synonymous, and that had to do with the rise of genre as a commercial category as much as anything. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of our canonized writers had no qualms about working with the fantastic—from Hawthorne and Poe to James and Wharton—and my sense is that a lot of the prejudice against fantasy, horror, etc. started with the New Critics in the 30’s and 40’s. There’s probably a long essay in that, which I won’t write.

If there has been a change, a lot of it, I think, was borne of frustration and boredom. By the mid-1990’s, the domestic mode was starting to feel like a prison to a lot of younger writers I knew. Many of us had grown up during the heyday of commercial SF and Horror in the 1970s, and that was what we read as kids. Personally, I started out as a straight-up horror writer, and it was only when my creative writing teachers told me that they didn’t accept “genre fiction” that I began to work in a more realist mode. I would say that the restrictions were good for me, and that I really needed to broaden my emotional range and explore character more fully. At the same time, I think that a lot of the creative energy and impetus in my work comes from the fantastic, the supernatural, etc. I think there’s a little glimmer of it even in my most realistic pieces—and when it’s not there, the piece doesn’t feel as alive to me. But I also don’t think I’m exactly in the New Fabulist mode, either. I’m sort of caught in-between.

But anyway, it’s hard to make sweeping statements about literary culture. Whether we’re in a new era, I don’t know. 
 


The novel is told through three characters’ points of view: Lucy, a small town girl who’s run off with her high school history teacher, George Orson; Ryan, who’s recently reunited with his biological father; and Miles, who is searching for his less-than-stable twin brother, Hayden. Each of these stories get equal weight and time in the book; was it always this way? Did you always envision the novel as having three narratives you were setting on a collision course?

Yes. It actually started as three separate short stories, which I was working on while I was waiting for a different (unfinished, moribund) novel to figure itself out. I kept toying around with these three narratives, and I had the instinct that they were connected in some way, but I didn’t know how. 
 


How did this work for you as you were writing? Did you work towards the mystery solved, or walk into it and hope to find an answer? The collision course you set these characters on: holy moley. We know it’s inevitable, although how the characters will collide is, as we all as writers strive for, also pretty surprising. I am hard-pressed to talk about how many delicious turns and progress the book makes without giving anything away.

The first draft of the book was really a process of figuring out what the connections were…and it was exciting to write because things kept surprising me as the three stories developed. Of course, it was also scary because there were times when I painted myself into a corner, and I didn’t know how to get out. I honestly didn’t know how the book was going to come together until the last hundred pages, though I knew from the beginning that the opening chapter and the closing chapter would happen on the same night.

I tend to think in terms of very abstract structural elements. Each chapter is a kind of building block, or episode, and I know it has to move the plot forward. But I can’t write plot until I get to know the characters, until understand why they do what they do. With this kind of novel, that was a very reckless method of writing, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without my fantastic editor, Anika Streitfeld, who read through the book as it was being written, chapter by chapter; and my wife, Sheila, who talked me through the book’s movements and managed to get me out of a number of dead ends. The big plot reveal in the last chapter was actually her idea.

Is there a method of writing for you that doesn’t feel reckless?

I don’t know. I always feel like other writers must have things figured out better than I do…they have outlines, they know what’s going to happen to their characters, maybe they draw diagrams. It worries me a little, now that I’m starting work on a new novel, that I never actually know what I’m doing. Eventually, I’m going to stop getting lucky and it’s all going to end in tears.

I love that Miles and Hayden are twins. There’s something delectably creepy about twins (see The Shining, for starters) and so full of literary potential for doubling and contrast. Was this a conscious decision from the start: did they start off as brothers, or perhaps one character to start?

I knew that they’d be twins from the beginning, and in fact that was one of the first things I knew about the book. I’ve always been fascinated by twins. When I was a kid, growing up in rural Nebraska, I was the only kid in my grade at school, and I felt like a freak compared to the other children, so I used to imagine that it would be great to have a twin, someone who I could relate to. I was also really interested in playing on the uncanny, creepy aspects of twins—the doppelganger stuff, the stuff about split-personalities and psychic connections–a whole body of iconic, suggestive memes that have been around for a long time that seemed like it would be fun to dig into.

I took many of your classes when I was an undergrad at Oberlin. As many as I could. In fact, I believe I was told by the department chair that I could not “major in Dan Chaon.” I know I’m not alone in being a devotee of your classes. (Are you blushing yet?) Can you talk a little about your identity as a teacher—and a much-stalked one to boot—and if, and how, this differs from your identity as a writer? How do you manage to reserve energy for your own work while teaching? Do you feel like you draw on different resources as a teacher than you do as a writer?

I feel like teaching makes me a better writer. I’m lucky, because my students at Oberlin are so smart, so talented, and so mature—I don’t really feel like they’re kids so much as people who share the same passion, and we’re in a lot of ways on the same journey. We’re all asking the same questions, none of which have a single, easy answer: how do you write a good, compelling scene? What makes a character come alive for a reader? What makes a sentence beautiful? These are questions that I struggle with all the time, just the like my students do, so it’s not like I’m really on a different level. I’ve just being doing it longer.

It is hard to teach and write, of course. A big problem is that a lot of times I’m more interested in my students’ work than I am in my own. But at the same time, I feel like I’m always learning and getting ideas when I talk with students. Talking through a student’s problem can often help me articulate something that will apply to my own work, and so there’s a give-and-take that proves to be valuable for me as a writer.

Await Your Reply, deservedly so, made a good number of end-of-the-year best of lists. I know you’re a voracious reader. What books did you love in the past year?

I used to put out a list of my favorite books every year for my students, and that was fun. I read a lot of contemporary fiction. I’ve gotten away from making lists, though, in the past few years. Partially, that was because I got to know a lot more writers, and I started to feel weird about ranking them, or leaving friends off my top 20, or whatever. A few years ago, one of my year-end lists (which I thought of as a private gift to my students) made its way onto the internet, and a couple of my friends had their feelings hurt by it. So I’ve gotten wary of this kind of public declaration. I don’t generally do reviews, for the same reason. Maybe that seems cowardly, or too politic.

But, anyway: here are some of the books that I read and enjoyed in 2009, not in order and not inclusive of all the books I loved: Lynda Barry, What It Is; Josh Bazell, Beat the Reaper; Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage; Ron Currie, Jr., Everything Matters; Amy Gerstler, Dearest Creature; Terrence Holt, In The Valley of the Kings; Victor Lavalle, Big Machine; Nami Mun, Miles From Nowhere; Sheila Schwartz, Lies Will Take You Somewhere; Jean Thompson, Do Not Deny Me; Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

How “pure” is your process—you sent me a playlist for the novel—do you listen to music while you write? Do you read other books? Talk about the a book or story’s progress with friends or family?

My process isn’t pure at all. In fact, it’s very dirty. I feel like my books are very patched together, and collage-y, and I’m always bringing elements of other works to bear on my own work. I do listen to music almost constantly—I make playlists that are supposed to get me in the right mood for writing about particular characters, and I read constantly while writing. I also watch TV and read comics, which is frequently a big influence, especially on plot, since I love serial structure.

There are a very few people I actually show my work to while it’s in progress, but I talk about aspects of the story to a great number of people. Sometimes I make up an alternate version of the book I’m writing, because that’s somehow easier and more useful to talk about. In any case, a book exists for me in so many different versions that it’s a long, long time before I have any idea what the final form will look like. 
 


Do you think of your characters as having certain taste in music, or is it music that you think is evocative of them to you?

Most of my characters don’t have very good taste in music. At least, they don’t share my taste in music.

Instead, the music I listen to is often a jumping off point for getting into a mood for a particular character or scene. The idea for Chapter 7, for example, came directly from a beautiful sad song by Josh Rouse called “Michigan,” which starts out “Dear Mom and Dad/I’m living in Michigan with Uncle Ray…” As I listened to the song, I began to get a sense of Ryan, driving through those woods, on his way to the cabin, and I had him writing a letter in his head to his parents which he would never send.

Another song, “My First Soul” by a band called Auld Lang Syne was absolutely essential to me when I was writing the last chapter—through it, I came to discover Hayden’s humanity, his sadness. It’s the song that I’d want to play over the closing credits of a movie of the book.

There is familiar geography in this book—your native Nebraska, and the Midwest, in particular—but also much farther reaches that we’re accustomed to in your fictions: Las Vegas, and the Artic Circle, for starters. Were these places you visited, to envision your characters inhabiting?

Some of the places are quite familiar to me—Cleveland, where I now live; and Lake McConaughy in Nebraska, where I spent childhood vacations. Other places, like Las Vegas and Ecuador, I visited; and still others, like Inuvik, NWT and Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, I only researched—through books and travel brochures and online, via YouTube videos. I chose places that would have the quality of stage-sets, because that was the mood that I wanted to create. 


You’re a somewhat recent user of both Twitter and Facebook. Do you consider these professional or personal accounts (in 2010, is there a difference)? How has that more public presence affected your persona as a writer? Did you read, for instance, Ben Yagoda’s essay in the NYT Book Review about replying to fan e-mail, etc.?

Well, it’s different for novelists than it is for non-fiction people like Yagoda. I don’t get that many emails, and I always answer them. I don’t think I’ve done that much to cultivate a “public presence.” I do occasionally use Twitter and Facebook to notify people when I have a reading or something, but mostly I just post links to stupid things that I find funny or interesting. I don’t generally tell people what I’m eating, or where I’m at, or what I’m experiencing emotionally at any given time. I haven’t put much energy into developing a compelling persona for my Internet Self. 
 


Await Your Reply strikes me as so contemporary without ever really making dated references; it addresses the age we’re in: of identity theft and turnover, of rapid and far-reaching communication. And yet there are great throwbacks, a sense of nostalgia running through the book as well: a dried-up lake and ghost town in Nebraska; a hypnotist named Mr. Breeze, ancient civilizations, Hayden’s past lives, etc… Can you talk about these juxtapositions and how you see these worlds overlapping?

The contemporary aspect of the book wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind when I first started writing. I started out wanting to work with pastiche, to draw on iconic gothic and dark fantasy imagery—spooky, post-apocalyptic landscapes, carnivals and mysterious ruins and roadside attractions; tropes from Hitchcock and Lovecraft and Bradbury and DuMaurier and Shirley Jackson; imagery from House of Mystery comics and bad dreams. I wanted to use all the clutter that haunted and fascinated me, and put it to work.

But at the same time, I wanted to put all this stuff in a contemporary, realistic setting, with everyday characters. I did do some research about identity theft, and hackers and trolls, and this wasn’t that hard since I spend a lot of time on the internet anyway. But most of that stuff wasn’t a big driving force. The heart of the realistic part of the book was the fact that I was raising teenage boys, and I was remembering a lot about what it felt like to be a teenager. Ryan and Lucy are sort of an amalgamation of my experience and the experiences my sons and their friends were going through; and even Miles and Hayden are sort of manchildren, stuck in adolescence, which I think is the real theme of the book.

I’ve always admired the way you don’t idealize children, or parent-child relationships; in fact, many of your youngest characters are at turns realistically creepy and flawed and not sickeningly precocious. I’m thinking of “The Bees,” or “Big Me,” and of course, Await Your Reply, where your portrait of young Hayden is neither cuddly nor average. How does raising sons change the way you write? I mean this on a practical level, as you raised your children with another writer and teacher, but also the way it changed your point of view. Did it become harder for you to write children and the parent-child relationship when you had them yourself?

I did a panel at the Associated Writing Program Conference this year about writing from a child’s point of view, and someone noted that students, at 18, 19, 20, are so close to childhood that they ought to be able to write about it vividly. But I disagreed. I think we are never further from childhood than in those years; and we are never closer to our childhood selves than when we have kids. I don’t write autobiography, but I certainly drew a lot on my experience as a parent, and my observations of my own children, which always drew forth vivid memories—memories I wouldn’t have re-encountered if I hadn’t been a parent.

Now that they’re older, do your boys read your work, and do they recognize some part of themselves or you in it?

It’s funny, because my sons and I frequently read and discuss books together. Most recently, Paul and I both read Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere, because he’s going to be attending Columbia College in Chicago, where Mun teaches. We had a great time talking about it.

But we have never talked much about my work. I know they have read some of my stuff, and they’ve mentioned aspects that they liked. I know, for example, that both of them really enjoyed “The Bees.” But we haven’t delved very far beyond that. There would definitely be details, large and small, that they’d recognize from real life in the books—particularly Await Your Reply—but they haven’t asked about it.

What’s in the pipeline? Stories? More novels?

I have another novel that I’m working on, which I’m under contract for. After that, I think I’d like to finish a collection of stories I’ve been working on for a while. I’m also playing around with screenplays and maybe a television pilot.

Does the “dirty” process you described earlier apply to projects as well? Do you move freely between these projects or try and finish one at a time?

I usually work on several at once—often, it takes me a while to figure out whether they are separate projects or part of the same thing, and in fact I’m still in the midst of that right now, trying to decide whether these fragments I’ve been messing with are really part of the same thing or whether I’m actually writing six or seven different books.

I was struck by the irony of the fluidity of the world that these characters live in. On the one hand, most of them make a conscious choice to leave behind the person they were at one point, changing their names or locations or occupations for a chance at a better life. But often in this disappearing act they discover that who they are is maybe too easy to shed, and not all of them find the freedom they’re looking for. In fact, many of them end up with a fate worse than the one they thought they were avoiding (see Ryan, on page 1, next to his severed hand). Here’s Lucy, on changing her identity:

Each of your characters has, in varying degrees, this “dear-God-what-have-I-done” moment. I wonder if you could talk a little about the difficulties of these shifts for them, of this kind of struggle between their internal and external identities, between the public and private personas we all move between. Without, of course, giving too much away.

As I mentioned before, I think this book is very much about adolescence—that time when all our adult choices are before us and we could be anyone, as Ryan says in his final chapter. This is stuff that really interests me, and I’ve written about it before. In some ways, the novel is a kind of extension or rewrite of my story “Big Me” and there’s a passage in that story that I mulled over:

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it’s hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years? How many end up nearly forgotten, mumbling and gasping for air in some tenement room of our consciousness…

That was one thing I was thinking about. Then I was also looking at it from the other end. As I was writing the book, my wife was very sick, and I knew that our time together was not going to be very long. I was intensely aware of the way that possibilities and futures that we imagine for ourselves would be taken away, and so I was also aware of those moments when we realize that our choices are not infinite.

When I lost Sheila, my life was shattered. Ironically, I now find myself once again in a situation in which I have to try to imagine myself into a new life, I have to try to remake myself without her, to fill up the blank slate of the future with something. I feel like I have been brought back full circle to the place I was when I was eighteen or nineteen, and I don’t like it one bit.

American culture tends to focus on the beauty and freedom of transformation, we worship the metaphor of the journey, but at the same time, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we long for home. 


In the novel, Hayden and Miles’ mother says “Oh Hayden,” she would say, with exasperation. “Why can’t you make up stories about happy people? Why does everything have to be so morbid?” This struck me as a nod to your own work, in which folks are not the particularly happy-go-lucky type, but also to the common complaint about “literary” fiction in general, that it’s too morbid, too depressing. Care to confirm, deny, or defend?

I don’t know how to answer, really. I know that I’ll never be accused of being too uplifting, and the passage you quote is definitely a nod to comments I’ve heard about my own work, and complaints that I’ve heard about literary fiction in general. Maybe I don’t understand what it means when people talk about a happy ending. Maybe I don’t understand what people want. I like the idea that literature draws us closer to other lives, and that the experience of knowing what it feels like from the point of view of someone else, and that it expands our ability to sympathize.

The question, then, is whether a work leads us to hope or towards despair. If a story moves abnormally toward “happy” resolution, isn’t that creating a false expectation, which will eventually disappoint? If a story moves toward the worst-case-scenario, doesn’t that also over-exaggerate?

I think that many people read doubt as sad and certainty as happy, but I’m not so sure.

Further Reading and Links

– You can download excerpts from each of Dan Chaon’s novels and collections on his website.

– Here’s the video trailer for Await Your Reply:

– Via last.fm, listen to the soundtrack for Await Your Reply.

- Online interviews with Chaon abound: here are two of our favorites: in The Believer; on NPR (it describes meat as a reward for writing!).

– If you’re shopping for copies of Dan Chaon’s books, support indie bookstores by buying from Powell’s: Await Your Reply, Among the Missing, You Remind Me of Me, Fitting Ends.

The classic The Things They Carried is being re-released in honor of its 20th anniversary, so unsurprisingly, Tim O’Brien keeps popping up in my radar lately. Besides being a powerful writer, O’Brien is also a great teacher, and in his recent interviews he offers useful thoughts for writers of all levels.

In this interview for Beyond the Margins (with Grub Street program manager Sonya Larson), O’Brien discusses the writing of The Things They Carried, how being a father changed his writing, and recent literary works by soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan:

I have read a number of books and magazine articles by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve read some really, really good ones, and– as there were in Vietnam– there are some really, really bad ones. By and large really great writing from all wars comes a good time afterwards, when a person has had the time to let material develop and form itself, so that it’s not rhetorical. So that it’s not so heavily autobiographical. The great works to come out of World War II, the great American works to come out of it, took years and years. The Naked and the Dead, Slaughterhouse Five, and Catch-22. They didn’t come the year after the war was over, and I don’t think you can expect that with any war.

It’s a bit like writing about cancer; there needs to be time. You need to find a way to transcend the tendency to put in every little detail. Just because it felt so important, it may not be important to the reader. And time is needed for imagination to come into play and to work with the material, to shape a story that may not be wholly in the real world, but only partly. I’ve read some really fine things that have come out of Iraq, and I’m sure even better things will come out in the years ahead.

In an audio interview with MediaBistro, O’Brien chatted about blurring the line between novel and memoir and the need to pay attention to sentences while writing:

Tim O'Brien / photo credit: David Louise Edelman

Something has gone wrong in our schools—it’s sad to see even in MFA programs students don’t know how to make decent sentences. In a lot of cases, I’m talking about grown, 35-year-old students who speak fine English, but for some reason, don’t write it. And students hate hearing that, but I think it’s absolutely essential for success. I don’t mean publishing, but a successful piece of work. [...] Just in my case, for a thing to end up any good—that is in its lasting power or lasting in it’s dance of language—requires a thing to sit for awhile on the desk. I think there’s a tendency—at least I have it, when I write emails—to not check our own sentences. That is going to undermine prose.”

And finally, in case you missed it, take 15 minutes and read O’Brien’s essay “Telling Tails” in The Atlantic’s 2010 Fiction Issue.

But for me, as a reader, the more dangerous problem with unsuccessful stories is usually much less complex: I am bored. And I would remain bored even if the story were packed with pages of detail aimed at establishing verisimilitude. I would believe in the story, perhaps, but I would still hate it. To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.

Every writer—emerging or not—should keep this idea in mind.

Margaret Lazarus Dean / photo credit Joe Vaughn

When I was asked whether I’d be interested in taking part in a panel on turning the MFA thesis into a first book, I said yes right away, but I wasn’t sure what I could contribute. In fact, I felt like a bit of a fraud because my journey from the thesis to the published book was so long and roundabout. But I’ve convinced myself that this is part of what makes my story worth telling here, because long and roundabout might be just as common as quick and straightforward, and my particular kind of roundabout experience makes me feel emboldened to give certain bits of advice.

I started the MFA program at Michigan writing short stories, as just about everyone does, but I always had trouble with the form. The first story I workshopped upon starting the program was about a little girl in Florida who sees the space shuttle Challenger explode in the sky over her school. It had some passages in it that I was proud of, but as a story it was an unwieldy, wandering thing with no real development and no plot to speak of. I was so clueless I didn’t even realize that these were serious deficiencies, and when one of my classmates told me that I was a good writer “at the sentence level,” I was naïve enough to think he was complimenting me. My Challenger story grew to 30 pages, then 50, then 80, until I finally realized that I was not writing the world’s longest short story, but had in fact embarked on a novel.

Challenger Explosion January 28, 1986

This is always a scary thing to admit to oneself, especially in the middle of an MFA program, many of which (including Michigan, at least at the time) can seem very story-centric. I met with two of my professors to ask long series of confusing craft questions, but in reality what I was asking them was whether it was okay that I was writing a novel, whether I would sound like an idiot if I said in public that I was. My professors were generous enough to encourage me to work on the novel, and pointed out to me that novels are easier to sell than short story collections, a fact that had not previously been brought to my attention.

In my last semester in the program, our class took part in a thesis workshop with Charles Baxter, in which each of our thesis projects was to be examined as a whole. At that point I had been working seriously on the novel for a year, and would like to be able to tell you that I was getting my feet under me, but I distinctly remember Charles Baxter explaining to me in one of our meetings in his office that it was not a good idea to spend fifty pages creating a main character and then end the second chapter with the words, “And I never saw him again.” A short story writer’s mistake, obviously—I had to learn that in the novel you don’t have to pack up all your toys and put them away at the end of each chapter.

I submitted as my MFA thesis the first 150 pages of a novel about a little girl who watches the space shuttle Challenger explosion, knowing that her father’s job at NASA and her own hopes of becoming an astronaut may have been lost along with the spacecraft and its crew. It felt like a bit of a cheat, to be honest— my classmates who submitted collections of stories, like Valerie Laken, had to actually finish each of those stories in every sense—even if there weren’t yet enough stories to make up a published collection, the writer at least had to demonstrate her ability to write complete stories, beginning middle and end. Submitting the first half of my novel (or, as it turned out, first third) felt like cheating because I not only had no idea how the book might end, I also had no idea how to structure a novel or in fact what the very next page would be. I had struggled through those 150 pages a sentence at a time, and I felt like a fraud presenting what I had come up with as “a novel,” when in fact I still felt like I had no idea how to write such a thing.

I was lucky enough to get a lectureship at Michigan after I graduated from the MFA program. In the evenings, on the weekends, and especially in the summertime, I picked up my copy of my “finished” thesis and shut myself away in my study and ordered myself to finish the book. This was time I spent largely reading over the pages I had already written and feeling alternately hopeful of the work’s potential and self-loathing at the fact that the whole thing hadn’t written itself already. I could see it so clearly when I closed my eyes: the child’s horror at the disaster standing in for an entire generation’s, the resonance when the child’s family breaks apart in slow motion just as the space shuttle breaks apart in the sky— but I kept sort of not seeing that on the pages I’d written. But then sometimes I did—sometimes the passages I’d written years before seemed great to me, or I could see glimpses of the greatness I imagined, and I spent months and years (and I am not exaggerating) rewriting the same paragraphs and pages over and over again when really what I probably needed to be doing was forging ahead, drafting the middle and end, thinking about structure and roadmaps. As I am doing with the novel I’m working on now.

A year after I finished the program, I was still teaching and still rewriting the same pages over and over again. A few people who had graduated around the same time I did suddenly got agents, and those agents made book deals for those writers based on partial manuscripts, causing panic attacks among the rest of us. I was suddenly stricken with anxiety that this was what I was supposed to have been doing: finishing a partial manuscript that I could entice an agent to be interested in. I decided that that was what I needed to do, but before I got to work seriously on cleaning up the first hundred pages, I made plans to meet with one of my professors from the program, Eileen Pollack, and this was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.

Eileen suggested we go for a walk rather than sitting down for coffee, and I still remember strolling through the spring buds of Burns Park while Eileen explained to me, very patiently, that I needed to write my book and not worry about what other people were doing. She told me that selling a partial manuscript was a nice option to have, that it had been the right choice for some of my classmates, but it was probably not going to be the right choice for me. Then she promised me— and this impresses me even more now than it did then— she promised me that I would find an agent and find a home for my book if I would just write it first and promise not to think about publication or money or any of the business side of it, and she was absolutely right. I did just need to write it, and to do that took another four years after that conversation.

Then, and only then, I sent the manuscript to six agents, three of whom offered to work with me. I signed with the amazing and beautiful Julie Barer in 2005, and, after we went through a round of edits together, she sold The Time It Takes to Fall to Simon and Schuster, who brought it out in February 2007, then in paperback in 2008.

I’m making all of that sound really quick and easy, and while I don’t want to mislead you, it really was quick and easy compared to the long hard slog of actually writing the book. But when it was done to my satisfaction I wasn’t afraid anymore of what the agents and editors of the world might say or not say, because I had finished my book and I was proud of it. This is a feeling that I highly recommend, as it also guards against fear of reviews and disappointing sales. It’s not that those things can’t hurt my career—they can—and it doesn’t put me above worrying what others think of my work, which I do, obsessively. But ultimately I can always sleep at night no matter what happens because what I wanted all along was to be a writer when I grew up, and I know I’ve become a writer because I wrote exactly the book I wanted to write.

Now I’m working on my second novel, and because I have a much clearer understanding of structure and how the moving parts of a book fit together, it’s going much more smoothly than my first novel did. Sometimes I wish I could e-mail notes to myself in 2002, telling myself how to take the long view of the narrative, how to roadmap the long arc of the story without getting bogged down in paragraphs and sentences. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t do that even if I could: As much as I make fun of my poky process over the years I wrote my first novel, I find that the process I used is inextricable from the finished book itself. When I flip through my book now looking for a passage to read at a book event, I remember how each scene, each paragraph came out. The things I’m most proud of in the book are the things that took the longest to bake, and so I can’t truthfully say I wish I’d written it more efficiently. If I’d written it efficiently, it wouldn’t be this book.

My students at the University of Tennessee sometimes ask how long it took me to write my book, and I see their faces sink a little when I tell them the truth. It’s important to me to be honest about how long it can really take, and I’m also honest about the fact that it was hard, that there were several points when I felt very strongly that I’d written myself into a corner that I wouldn’t be able to get out of, when I was convinced that I would have to quit and start over. I tell them something I heard Charles Baxter say once in a lecture, that “literature is not a sack race.” I say this to students probably once a week. My husband and I say it to each other around the house. When we write, what we are aiming for is not just to be done, and not just to be published, but to be read and remembered long after we are dead. It takes courage and perseverance to write, and it takes even more courage and perseverance not to be in a rush.

And—I give exactly the same advice to my present graduate students that Eileen gave to me. Write your book, make sure it’s the book you wanted to write when you first said, “I think I want to be a writer when I grow up,” and then—and only then—go out into the world with it.

Extras

- Margaret Dean adapted this essay from her talk for the 2010 AWP panel From MFA Thesis to First Novel—Five Writers Share Their Stories. (Sheila O’Connor, Geoff Herbach, Nami Mun, Valerie Laken, Patti Frazee, Margaret Lazarus Dean)

Is the MFA thesis an end or a beginning? How do we know if our thesis project is a viable book or an early draft that still requires radical revision? For books that need revision, how do writers practice the necessary discipline novels require over the long haul? How do emerging writers secure agents and publishers for that first book? Focusing on the challenges and triumphs of seeing theses projects into print, five first- time novelists will share their diverse writing and publishing experiences. – Description from the AWP Program

- Read an interview with Margaret Lazarus Dean here on Fiction Writers Review, and follow her on The Time It Takes to Blog.

- Read reviews of The Time It Takes to Fall, via the author’s website. Click here to buy the paperback from Powell’s.

- Five British writers talk to the Observer’s Kate Kellaway about writing their first novels–and getting them published.

- Listen to Grammar Girl’s podcast about Scott Sigler’s “surprisingly simple and slightly disturbing” advice for writing a first novel: in addition to writing every day, he advises penning a “bad book” first, as a way to learn what not to do. And read Robert Twiggler’s “Nine Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Your First Novel” on The First Post.

Charles Johnson: photo credit Mary Randlett

Charles Johnson taught creative writing at the University of Washington from 1976 to 2009. His first book, a collection of political cartoons entitled Black Humor, appeared in 1970 when he was twenty-two years old. In fall 1972 Johnson introduced himself to John Gardner, author of many distinguished novels and then professor of English at Southern Illinois University. Under Gardner’s tutelage, Johnson began writing his first published novel, Faith and the Good Thing. His critique of the phenomenological aesthetics of contemporary African American fiction, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, appeared in 1988.  Following the well-reviewed Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson wrote his masterpiece, Middle Passage (1990), which won the prestigious National Book Award, making him just the second African American male to win the prize, following Ralph Ellison in 1953 for Invisible Man.  Johnson published a fourth novel, Dreamer (1998), and three collections of short fiction: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986), Soulcatcher and Other Stories (2001), and Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories (2005).  Some of Dr. Johnson’s essays about his spiritual life and Buddhist philosophy appear in Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (2003). Charles Johnson has written more than twenty screenplays, including the script for the prize-winning PBS film of Booker T. Washington (Booker, 1985). Moreover, he has written or edited the text for such nonfiction books as Black Men Speaking (1997), Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery (1998), King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. (2000), and Mine Eyes Have Seen: Bearing Witness to the Struggle for Civil Rights (2007).  Dr. Johnson’s body of work has garnered many prizes, most notably a MacArthur Fellowship (1998), and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature (2002).

During the last few years that Dr. Johnson taught at the University of Washington, I was lucky enough to study with him in UW’s MFA program. I grew up in New York and New Jersey and lived a mostly nomadic life in my twenties; I sold bread, washed dishes, built rock staircases in the Adirondacks, doled medication to schizophrenics in a halfway house, drove a truck and planted trees for a nursery in Albuquerque. When I moved from New Mexico to Seattle in 2005 and took my first workshop with him, he led me to new reckonings with regard to how I was able to perceive the world. His example challenged me to consider the possibility of a morally coherent world, a world where all things are possible, including goodness and virtue. His mentorship has been a gift that I am in no way capable of reciprocating.

I am not alone. Counted among his former students are such authors as Johanna Stoberock, G.W. Hawkes, Kathy Alcala, and David Guterson. He’s mentored scores of students, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. And there are dozens—if not hundreds more—whose writing and whose lives he’s challenged and inspired by his work, by his thought-provoking example, and by his kindness, compassion and integrity.

The following interview took place as a series of email conversations in January and February 2010.

Interview:

WATTERSON: Let’s begin with mentorship. Who were your first mentors and how did they contribute to your growth?

JOHNSON: My first mentor was the prolific cartoonist/writer Lawrence Lariar. When I was fifteen I began studying comic art in a correspondence course with Lariar, who published over 100 books, wrote detective fiction under a couple of pseudonyms, was a Disney studio “idea” man, cartoon editor for Parade magazine, and editor of Best Cartoons of the Year. Some summers when I was in high school I’d travel to New York City to see if I could score some assignments with magazines and publications located there, and I’d visit him at his home on Long Island, where he gave me some of his original work and good, professional advice. Back in Evanston, Illinois, my home town, I began publishing my stories and illustrations when I was 17. And for the next seven years that’s what I did when I went away to college, publishing two collections of political cartoons, Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation-Time (1972) and over 1,000 drawings and illustrations. I also created, hosted and co-produced in 1970 the PBS how-to-draw series, “Charlie’s Pad.” Last week I was at University of Houston-Victoria, and one of my hosts told me he saw the show in Texas in the early 80s when he was a kid. Each of the fifty-two, fifteen-minute lessons was based on the course I took with Lariar between 1963-65, and we stayed in touch until I moved to Seattle to teach at UW in 1976.

Could you talk about how John Gardner’s mentorship helped you grow as a writer?

When I met Gardner—when I was in my second, final year of a master’s-degree program in philosophy and working as a journalist on a small newspaper in Southern Illinois (journalism was my bachelor’s degree)—I had already written six novels in a period of two years (the second in that series was an early attempt at doing what later became Middle Passage). Prose rhythm and voice were two things Gardner was skillful at doing, so I began my focus on those elements of craft during the nine months I wrote Faith and the Good Thing with him looking over my shoulder. We hit off it, I think, because Gardner had an interest in philosophy, and I admired the example he offered as an imaginative fiction writer who was also a scholar of medieval literature, a literary critic, a poet, a musician and composer of librettos, a playwright, and not a bad painter (I have one of his still life oil paintings and two sketches of characters from his novel Jason and Medeia in my home.) In his fiction work I saw formal virtuosity, a respect for the moral and spiritual life (at least for Christianity in his case, which I appreciated since I was raised in an African Methodist Episcopal church), and he was as prolific and dedicated to creating as my earlier teacher Lariar. One of the six novels I’d written before meeting Gardner was accepted for publication when I was working on Faith, a book that was very much in the style of James Baldwin, which is why I believe the publisher liked it. I asked Gardner if I should publish it because with Faith I was finally getting a handle on the original approach to philosophical fiction that I’d been trying to achieve. His advice was, “If you think later you’ll have to climb over it, then I’d say, no.” So I requested it back from the publisher, and I’ve always been glad I did. That novel simply wasn’t my philosophical vision so, though it was difficult to turn away from a book contract (every young writer wants to get published), I did, and gambled that Faith would be published when I finished it, which it was when I was twenty-six.

Gardner’s influence helped me understand all of what is at stake when we write. He told me a novel should be as perfect as one can make it before you submit it for publication; he counseled often that, “Any sentence that can come out should come out.” Knowing him ratcheted up my concern with craft—experiments with form as a meditation in itself—and literary aesthetics.

As a philosopher and a Buddhist, you must have had spiritual mentors who influenced you. Can you talk about their impact on your literary and spiritual life?

I can’t say that I’ve had a particular spiritual mentor. But I am fond of the work of scores of Buddhist writers as well as those who follow a spiritual path in other religious traditions. And I took formal vows, the Ten Precepts (as a lay-person or upasaka) with my friend, Claude AnShin Thomas, a mendicant monk and author of At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey From War to Peace.

As you know, the poet and memoirist E. Ethelbert Miller is going to be one of the writers who will appear onstage at this tribute event in Denver in April 2010. Would you reflect on your friendship with him?

Poet Miller tells me we first met at a PEN/Faulkner ceremony when my first story collection, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, was a nominee in 1986. I like to call him BrerBert and Mr. Wizard because of all the remarkable things he accomplishes as an arts activist. In this country in general, and in Washington D.C. in particular, he is “Mr. 411,” the person who you call for an answer to any question about contemporary black writers or black culture. He has a heart as big as all outdoors. He is a relentless advocate for emerging and often forgotten writers or those who have not received the recognition and support they deserve. As a matter of fact, he has lobbied to get jobs for writers. There is simply no one like him.

Would you speak about your friendship with the late playwright August Wilson?

I recently published a story (or maybe it’s really an essay) on the fifteen years August and I had eight to ten-hour dinner conversations about Everything until five in the morning here in Seattle at the Broadway Bar and Grill (in other words, until they had to close and kicked us out.). It’s called “Night Hawks,” and appears in the summer, 2009 issue of Kenyon Review. A slightly shorter version (by 1000 words) was published in the spring 2009 Lincoln Center Theater Review when director Bartlett Sher directed August’s play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone—the same performance that President Obama took First Lady Michelle to see. It took me several years after his death to reach a point, emotionally, where I could bring myself to share in a literary work the wealth of impressions and personal details I’d accumulated in my head about America’s most celebrated black playwright. Writing this piece was very hard, because he was my friend and rather like a brother because we were born just three years apart, and grew up in the same cultural and racial worlds of the 50s and 60s. (The latest edition of my novel, Oxherding Tale, has a cover that August came up with, and he gets in the book credit for cover design and art.) I recommend that readers of this interview take a look at “Night Hawks” in Kenyon Review for the full story of our friendship.

I love that essay. I remember a moment when you talk about how August Wilson used to dream that after finishing his ten play cycle he would take a decade out of the spotlight. And how he’d emerge from that long span of seclusion like Eugene O’Neill did after his decade out of the public eye. What is it about the power of silence and isolation that can be so nourishing for one’s work?

I think every artist needs a quiet place where he can hear himself think without being constantly interrupted by others, by their needs and concerns. This is very much like needing to have a quiet, secluded place for the practice of meditation. Often during my life I’ve simply had to disengage from the social world in order to finish a project—like the month I spent in January, 1998 writing the twelve stories for Africans in America (later released as my third story collection, Soulcatcher and Other Stories). In our society we’re constantly bombarded by external stimuli—the phone ringing, the 3,000 product messages we’re exposed to daily and, of course, the needs of our spouses, children, family, friends and students. August simply wanted the uninterrupted time to think about and work on a novel he very much wanted to write, to create new plays not related to his ten-play cycle, to spend quality time with his wife and young daughter, and to sit on his porch reading a big stack of books he never had the time to get to since he was producing a play for the cycle every two years or so, seeing it through production, living away from home (Seattle) for months at a time, answering the questions of reporters, and doing public events of one kind or another. One has to “let go” these public exigencies in order to create. August and I talked about this problem—the constant “performance” pressure we lived with—all the time. To be honest, that’s one reason I retired from teaching last year after thirty-five years in the classroom. Just a day or two ago I read an interview by actor Linda Hamilton about her years of working with—and being married to—director James Cameron, and one statement she made stuck with me. She said Cameron once said anyone could be a husband or a father, but there were only five people in the world who could do what he does, and he was committed to pursuing that. Is this selfishness on his part? I don’t think so. In order to serve the art, which will become a gift to others (and the culture) perhaps for generations, an artist often has to just step away from the quotidian demands of public life and the social world.

In “Night Hawks” you talk about how you and August Wilson both had parents who were raised to value good manners, promise-keeping, personal sacrifice, loyalty to their own parents and kin, and a deep-rooted sense of decency. Do you ever find yourself disillusioned by new evidence of a loss of these values?

Yes, I’m very saddened by the erosion of those values in contemporary American society. I think about this every day, and this sea change will be dramatized front-and-center in my next novel.

There’s that moment toward the end of “Night Hawks” when you and August Wilson left the Broadway Grill, where you’d been talking for hours, and went to a nearby IHOP. As you sat at a table, you could feel the tension in the air, and then two guys stomped a third guy’s fingers and kicked his face to pulp. When the three of them fled, you looked around and noticed August was gone. His instincts from growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh kicked in, and he scrambled to an exit at the back of the restaurant. What advice would you give to writers who in their work want to address the violence they witness?

Be honest about it. That scene I described isn’t pretty. I just tried in the best journalistic fashion I could muster to put on the page with the greatest granularity of detail I could achieve what was given in perception to August and me in those brief, violent moments, unadulterated and uncensored. Later in this piece I venture an interpretation of what that violence means, or at least what it meant—as I see it—when you view it through the lens of our lives as black American male artists who grew up in the 50s and 60s.

In what ways did your friendship with August Wilson, a writer of your generation, anchor you as a writer? Have your friendships with writers significantly contributed to your life as a writer?

Except when we’re collaborating on projects with others, which I’ve done a lot of, the activity of writing is lonely, very solitary. That’s never bothered me because I was an only child and from kidhood learned to find ways to amuse myself for hours on end with no one else around. Nevertheless, sharing thoughts, feelings and experiences with another artist on a regular basis is refreshing. That person becomes like a mirror. Their experiences and practice can clarify and bring a subtler understanding to our life and creative practice. This is so because regardless of the discipline we’re talking about—writing fiction or plays, drawing, acting, etc.—there are commonalities at the core of the creative process and the creative imagination. (I would even extend this to the sciences and philosophy.) The other is always a helpful mirror for understanding ourselves better.

When I asked you this question three years ago, you said you wrote at night. Since my wife is pregnant and due in July, this question comes up for me a lot, and so I want to ask you to explain again how you managed to maintain a disciplined writing life while being a husband and father. If you were to write a manifesto on how best to generate new work and also fulfill one’s role as a parent, what would it say? Does generosity matter? Is there something powerful about the idea of serving?—serving one’s work, serving one’s family? Could it be that one’s various roles have an underlying unity?

Congratulations, Zach, to you and your wife! This is happy news. Regarding your question, I have to confess that in sixty-one years of living I’ve never taken a vacation. Not once. When not teaching, or doing speaking engagements, all my free time—summers, holidays, weekends, etc.—has been devoted to the dove-tailing creative projects I’ve had since I was an undergraduate, and to the things I love to study (Sanskrit, the logarithmic progress today of developments in the sciences, Buddhist sutras, and philosophy). Sometimes during the summer, I’d send my wife and kids off for a month of vacation with our relatives in the Midwest or South, and I’d stay in the empty house with the cat or dog, writing novels and screenplays. (They came to understand early on that sometimes Daddy is “here” physically but mentally is living somewhere else for a short period of time until he finishes the project(s) on his desk.) There have been more days than I care to remember when I taught or lectured, here or abroad, without going to bed the night before; nights when I suddenly and involuntarily burst into tears from total fatigue while working at three a.m. on some project with its deadline looming. My being a Buddhist has always helped. Thirty years of practicing meditation helps. When working, with my full concentration focused on an object (especially an imaginative one—a fiction, a drawing—as it takes shape in the world), I utterly forget myself and any personal concerns I might have at the moment. The illusory “self” disappears and there is only the present moment of doing, being completely absorbed, serving the work, which I know will financially serve my family’s needs, and ideally serve in the long run literary culture. It also helps, I guess, that I’ve been a martial-artist since I was nineteen-years-old and love to work out. My doctor told me last fall that I’m healthier than most men my age and I could live to be 100. In our home gym, I regularly get on the treadmill for 100 minutes, bench-press 240 pounds, review my old Choy Li Fut kung-fu sets (the fighting system friends and I taught for ten years at our studio here in Seattle in the 80s and 90s), do sets of twenty-five push-ups, etc. I like to turn on my I-Pod (filled with hours of soft jazz, anything with a saxophone in it) and sweat. Those hours in the gym are (for me) like a mini-vacation from the demands of the social world. So all these things flow together—mind, body, spirit—and reinforce each other in the realms of family, profession, and personal discipline. It also helps to remember something once said (I believe) by William James: “The essence of genius is knowing what to overlook.” I’ve always ignored everything that doesn’t relate directly to my family’s well-being and the particular work, creative and intellectual, that I was given to do in this life-time. If something doesn’t serve that, then it’s not on my radar screen.

You addressed slavery in Middle Passage and Oxherding Tale and its legacy of racism in Dreamer. How do you feel about the persistence of racism in our society, and whether or when or how it will ever end?

I don’t believe what we call “racism” will ever end. Racism is based on our belief in a division between Self and Other, and our tendency to measure ourselves against others (which is a natural thing, like looking at others and wondering, “How well am I doing?”), and to judge them as either better or worse than ourselves. Sad to say, it is also based on fear. This constant measuring of ourselves in a social context is something human beings will always do until they experience—as a Buddhist would say—awakening, which frees us from judging others or ourselves. And, in my humble opinion, it will be a very long time before all the billions of people on this earth awaken.

Would you be willing to share some of the lessons you learned from your parents and talk about how they felt about your career?

I always told my Dad, who died six years ago at age eighty-one, that he was the one who taught me how to work. Especially how to work unselfishly for the sake of one’s family—I remember back in the 60s when there was a time my father worked three jobs a week (construction during the day, as a night watchman in the evening, and helping an elderly white couple fix up their suburban home on the weekends). Seeing him work like that every day taught me that a person with a strong back and a good mind could accomplish anything he (or she) set out to do. My mother, who died in 1981, was the person in my family who gave me an appreciation for books, learning, and the beauty of art. They were always proud of me—their only child—and I never, ever, wanted to do anything with my life that would make them feel ashamed, because of all the sacrifices they made for me.

You mentioned earlier that you withdrew a book from publication, a novel that would have been your debut. Can you talk a bit about what you learned from writing six apprentice novels before Faith?

Those six “apprentice” novels, as I’ve always called them, taught me that a person who wishes to be a writer must write all the time. Every day. Even if only in your writer’s notebook or journal. They also taught me that 90% of good writing is revision. I’d write three drafts of those first six books, finishing one every ten weeks, but I hadn’t learned until I did Faith how to revise—that true revision is re-envisioning every sentence and paragraph, deepening and polishing them for music and meaning until no more revision is possible. And so I learned to generate pages. My ratio of throwaway pages to keep pages is often twenty-to-one. For Faith (written in nine months), I tossed out 1200 pages; for Oxherding Tale (written in five years) I tossed out 2400 pages; for Middle Passage (a six-year project), it was 3000 pages; and for Dreamer, more than 3,000 over the seven years I worked on that book. However, as Gardner mentioned to me in the early 70s, as the years—and decades—roll by, it becomes possible to write fast and with a high level of craft or professionalism because you no longer make the mistakes you made in your youth. Also because by the time I sit down to do a first draft of something, I’ve already composed in my head (or sketched out notes for) the opening sentence and thought a great deal about the movements in a piece. In other words, one of my cultivated, literary habits when I think is to revise a thought—playing with diction or word choice, and sentence structure—before I speak or put pen to paper. It’s just one of those habits you develop from writing for forty years and teaching for thirty-five

You mentioned earlier that your next novel will dramatize the erosion of values in contemporary American society. Can you say more about your inspiration for this novel?

My inspiration is the lack of civility and the disinterest in civilized living that I see every day around me in contemporary America, the lowering of personal and professional standards, the selfishness and violence and anger, and the absence of shared values in a country that has been culturally Balkanized for my entire adult life. I’ve been addressing these matters in my essays and articles for a decade now, especially the essays in Tricycle, Buddhadharma and Shambhala Sun. In the new philosophy book I co-authored with Michael Boylan the first story is my tale, “The Cynic,” narrated by Plato, which was originally published in Boston Review. He describes the moral collapse of Athens after the Peloponnesian War. What happened to the Athenians is, in my view, very much an analog for what we are seeing in America today. We have our ruthless people like Thrasymachus and Jason in Euripides’ Medea, our political leaders like the ones described by Thucydides (“Inferior intellects,” he wrote, “generally succeeded best”). And we certainly have our teachers at the universities (in the humanities) who are the spitting image of the Sophists.

Your book Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction: Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing, which you coauthored with Michael Boylan, is coming out this month from Westview Press. From advance praise for the book, I gather it combines writing exercises with short fictions starring Plato, Kant, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Can you say more about this new book?

What I want to say is that from start to finish this is Michael Boylan’s book. He was inspired to put it together after reading a few of my short stories that have philosophers as protagonists (Plato, Descartes, the Buddha, Martin Luther King Jr.). But Boylan did all the work, all the heavy lifting in terms of pedagogy. He wrote six new stories of his own about traditional philosophers, but with my stories and his on Hannah Arendt and Iris Murdoch, he expanded the list of thinkers beyond what is in the usual philosophy textbook to include women and people of color, in the West and East. He wrote the introduction for each section; the study questions for both the stories and classic, primary texts; and provided the glossary at the front of the book and the “philosophy games” at the end. He explains the difference between direct, deductive presentations (philosophy), and indirect argument (fiction), and shows teachers how to get their students to write in both ways with intellectual rigor. Boylan is an outstanding educator. My contribution is minimal compared to his. But I have to add that this new book, my eighteenth, is an addition to my body of work (as well as to Boylan’s—he’s published over twenty books and ninety articles on philosophy and literature, as well as a novel of his own, The Extinction of Desire, for which I wrote an introduction) that makes me enormously happy. It should be very helpful to everyone interested in the relationship between philosophy and literature. Last week the publisher, Westview Press (they are Boylan’s regular publisher), sent me a lovely card that said, “We are tremendously proud of this book, as I hope you are, too.” Well, I am. And I’m in Michael Boylan’s debt forever.

Thank you for your time and energy. May your work continue to unfold in ways that surprise and delight you. We look forward to reading more.

Thank you, Zach.

For Further Reading:

For more on Charles Johnson, including a bibliography, links to selected work, and a list of his top twenty books, please visit the author’s website.

You can also read an essay by Johnson in the Summer 2008 issue of the American Scholar, entitled “The End of the Black American Narrative.”

Or read a 2009 article on “what you should expect from a worthwhile fiction workshop” that Johnson wrote for Writer’s Digest, entitled “A Boot Camp for Creative Writing (Uncut).”

Or quiz your friends: Which novelist helped create the modern London police force? Which novelist made only $1838 per year in today’s dollars? If these writers could turn out masterpieces like As I Lay Dying and In the Penal Colony and the Chronicles of Barsetshire while working, you can too.

Now get back to your writing, and don’t let your boss see you.

Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, the Guardian recently asked several contemporary authors for their own rules of writing. Writers such as Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith, and many others answered the call ((Here’s Part One; and here’s Part Two).

You may have noticed that at Fiction Writers Review, we take our rules with a pinch of skepticism. (Steven Wingate’s Quotes & Notes series has investigated some of the “rules” embodied in writing-related quotes.) But writing is a hard job, and we all long for the magic formula that will help us get it done. So it’s hard not to be swayed by firm, concrete advice like this:

Diana Athill: You don’t always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they’d be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it’s the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)

Margaret Atwood: You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

Roddy Doyle: Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”.

Geoff Dyer: Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

Anne Enright: Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

Jonathan Franzen: Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page. [Ed. Note: Having heard Franzen expound on this at length, in person, I can tell you that he's not joking at all here.]

AL Kennedy: Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.

Hilary Mantel: If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.

FWR readers, tell us: What are your “rules” for writing? What are the best writing do’s and don’ts you’ve encountered?

Photo from http://www.mailemeloy.com/

Introduction

In 1993, the late David Foster Wallace published “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction. The essay, later collected in Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, ponders television’s influence on American fiction and postulates a somewhat surprising theory. After considering the ironic, postmodernist work of writers such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, Wallace concludes:

The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. [...] Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval… The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama…

If Wallace was right, then author Maile Meloy is not only a rebel, she might just be leading the quiet revolution. In both her short stories and novels, Meloy has a gift for animating the seemingly banal. She possesses the ability to skirt the edge of sentimentality and melodrama, then elevate the entire work to high art.

Maile Meloy was born and raised in Helena, Montana, in the early 1970s. It was a childhood without television, and by the time Meloy was ten years old her father had her reading Jane Eyre and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Though she was an early reader of the classics, Meloy didn’t pursue writing until many years later.

While studying at Harvard, Meloy took a fiction-writing workshop taught by Richard Ford. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author saw talent in the young writer and encouraged her to study at the University of California-Irvine with his longtime friend Geoffrey Wolff.

By the time her run at Irvine was drawing to a close, Meloy was already represented by ICM über-agent Amanda “Binky” Urban. Soon enough, Sarah McGrath, then an editor at Scribner, called.

Meloy made a heady literary debut with the story collection Half in Love (Scribner, 2002). By that time, Meloy’s fiction had appeared in the Best New American Voices 2000, which was edited by Tobias Wolff. She had also been published in the New Yorker, and her story “Aqua Boulevard” had not only appeared in the Paris Review, but had won the journal’s prestigious Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

Meloy’s first novel, Liars and Saints (Scribner, 2003), appeared one year after her story collection and garnered critical praise and strong sales. Three years later, her second novel A Family Daughter (Scribner, 2006) was followed by awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2003, Meloy won the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, and in 2007 she was one of twenty-one authors chosen by Granta as the “Best of Young American Novelists.”

Throughout this streak of publications and awards, Meloy’s fresh handling of contemporary realism did not go unnoticed by critics.

When Liars and Saints was published, the Boston Globe opined that Meloy might be “the first great American realist of the twenty-first century.” The New York Times Magazine called Meloy’s writing “meticulous realism.”

When the author’s second collection,
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It (Riverhead, 2009), was published this past summer, it landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Applauding her stories, reviewer Curtis Sittenfeld noted “a kind of banal, daily desperation animates many of Meloy’s characters.” And the Los Angeles Times (now Meloy’s hometown paper) wrote that the new collection was “more evidence of Meloy’s fluency as a realist writer, of her Chekhovian resistance to resolving the existential dilemmas posed in her stories.”

Easy answers, it seems, are nonexistent in Maile Meloy’s writing. Her character’s struggles resonate long after a story’s conclusion. Through prose that is concise, confident, and empathetic, she evokes, as Wallace wrote, the “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions” of life, and treats them with “reverence and conviction.” If Meloy’s new collection is any evidence of what we can expect in the future, it would appear the rebellion Wallace predicted nearly two decades ago is in its ascendancy. Vive la révolution!

[The following interview with Meloy was conducted via email. After the interview had wrapped, the New York Times Book Review named Meloy’s new collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It to their list of ‘The 10 Best Books of 2009’ and called her stories “concise yet fine-grained narratives.”]

Interview

JOSHUA BODWELL: Can you remember back to a short story collection that had a formative effect on you? A collection that made you feel as though you were reading for the first time?

WWCD? Illustration by Tammy Ackerman of North40Creative

MAILE MELOY: The Collected Stories of John Cheever made me feel that way, in my early twenties. I carried it around for months, and still remember where I was when I was reading different parts of it. I was trying to learn how to write stories then, and I felt like I should have a bracelet that said “What Would Cheever Do?”

But the first story collection in my memory is a book of Isaac Asimov short stories on tape that we listened to on a long car ride when I was really young. I remember being absolutely riveted, staring at the back of the front passenger seat, as a woman fell in love with her domestic robot, Tony. I don’t remember the whole plot of any of the stories, but I remember the feelings of suspense and heartbreak, and the need to know what happened next.

Where do your own short stories typically begin? A scene or situation? A narrator’s voice?

They almost always begin with a scene or a situation, often very small, always involving at least two people. But the stories don’t go unless I have the voice. It’s like a getting into a car with a tricky clutch, and you can either get it in gear or you can’t. I think the voice has a lot to do with whether I can get the story in gear and make it go.

All of the stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It remain surprisingly close to the sentiment of the book’s title: the characters are often torn between what they have and what they want. Did you discover this theme in your stories once you started gathering them together, or did you arrive at the theme first and then write stories toward it?

The stories were all written at different times, over several years, and I didn’t think I had a collection for a long time, and I didn’t realize how much they had in common thematically until I read them all together. My editor, Sarah McGrath, suggested the title, which had always been there near the end of one of the stories, waiting to be noticed. It’s from the A.R. Ammons poem that is the epigraph of the book, and I think it’s the kind of title that adds something to the book, and helps bring it together.

Your first collection, Half in Love, was published seven years ago. Do you see any significant differences between the stories in that collection and the stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It?

The titles reflect the big difference: Half in Love is more about people who can’t help but withhold part of themselves, and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is about people who don’t want anything withheld from them. It’s a more assertive book in a way.

The stories are also longer, and I’m older, and I’ve tried to do things I couldn’t do in Half in Love. I think “Liliana” might be my first comic story. It started out being my first ghost story, but I couldn’t help finding a real explanation for the appearance of the dead grandmother at the door.

Neither Half in Love nor Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It feature the ubiquitous “title story.” Can you share your thoughts on titling these two collections?

I’ve never had a story title that could serve as the title for a whole book, but both titles were existing phrases within the books. In my story, the phrase is about a crush, but “half in love” is also from the Keats poem “Ode to a Nightingale”: “and I have been half in love with easeful death.” So the phrase had both sex and death in it, and that seemed appropriate to the collection.

I’m very slow about titles, and I welcome suggestions from people who’ve read early drafts. Sarah, my editor, usually comes up with a very long list—I don’t know how she does it. My favorite suggestion for Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, from a friend who’s a comedy writer, was Here Comes Mr. Hockey: The Gordy Howe Story. That still makes me laugh.

In Half in Love there is a nearly even balance between stories written in the first-person and third-person points of view (as well as one second-person story, the stunning “Ranch Girl,” your first story to appear in the New Yorker). However, in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It there is just a single first-person story, “Liliana,” which whetted the appetites of your fans when it appeared in the Paris Review a few months before the collection hit the shelves. Can you talk about your decisions surrounding the point of view in a story? Have you ever “saved” a story by changing the point of view?

If a story works, it’s usually because I’ve found the right voice for it, and the voice and the narration are so entwined that it tends to stay the way I started it. But a few times I’ve changed the narration halfway through. A story in Half in Love called “Four Lean Hounds, ca. 1976” started out in first person, and it’s a story about a man whose best friend dies in an accident while they’re diving together. In trying to comfort his friend’s wife, he ends up sleeping with her. Geoffrey Wolff pointed out to me that if the story is told in first person, you don’t know whether to trust the narrator or not. Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he killed the guy. I didn’t want that kind of confusion—I wanted a story that was true as it was told. First person suggests unreliability so easily, and unreliability might be the most effective use of it, in short stories. I tend to write narrators who are telling the truth even if the characters aren’t, which might be why almost all of these stories are in third person: for the authority.

“Ranch Girl” didn’t work until I started it in the second person. The New Yorker asked to change it to third person, and I agreed, but I always liked it better in second and changed it back for the book.

What I’ve never done is to write an omniscient short story with multiple perspectives, and I would so love to. I read Ivan Bunin’s “The Gentleman from San Francisco” a year or two ago and fell in love with it and thought I must write an omniscient short story, ideally a Russian one, right now. I tried and tried, and kept failing. Close third is as close as I’ve gotten. Someday, though.

You have a great gift for writing both from the male point of view (as in your masterful “Aqua Boulevard”) and about men (as in the story that opens your new collection, “Travis, B.”). There is a wonderful line in “Tome,” the first story in Half in Love, where the narrator, a competent female attorney, says, “I thought, That’s what it’s like to be a man. If I were a man I could explain the law and people would listen and say ‘Okay.’ It would be so restful.” Is there a little bit of the author in that declaration? Is that why two of Half in Love’s six first-person stories are told in a man’s voice, as well as the only first-person story in your new collection? Can you share your thoughts about both female authors writing as men, and male authors writing from a female perspective?

I didn’t realize there were so many male protagonists until I put all the stories together. I think part of the reason I like a male perspective is that it gets me out of myself. I wrote “Aqua Boulevard” at a time when I was working on “Tome” and other stories about women in the west, and I felt like I had that voice down pretty well, but I was so tired of it. So I started a monologue, not knowing where it was going, in the voice of a 70-year-old Frenchman (mimicking a 70-year-old Frenchman I know and love), just to get out of the rhythm of my own voice. And it was hugely freeing. So then I had to add other characters and make something happen.

You have published two novels between your two story collections. Do you think your work as a novelist has affected your short story writing?

Having written two novels might be the reason the stories are a little longer now. But I think that writing short stories has affected the novels more: both novels have slightly story-like chapters, and I think writing short stories trains you to a kind of efficiency, because everything needs to count.

In Curtis Sittenfeld’s review of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It in the New York Times Book Review, she praises your restraint and says, “She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope.” Can you talk about your process of working with this restraint? Do you write long first drafts in order to tighten in successive drafts? Or are your first drafts spare?

They’re spare. I often start with not that much more than dialogue. Then I have to go back and put in details about what things look like and where everyone is and what they’re wearing. What happens between people is the most interesting thing to me. I have to make sure that readers can see the scene, and feel it, but I don’t really care what the trees look like. I can make myself care if the trees are really important.

In 2007, Granta named you as one of twenty-one authors on their list “Best of Young American Novelists.” You followed this honor with the publication of a collection of short stories—a collection of stories that landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, nonetheless. How do you feel about the seemingly endless debate about the state of the short story in America?

I love short stories—writing them and reading them—and so many wonderful writers are writing so many good ones. It’s true there’s a vastly shrunken marketplace, but that doesn’t stop everyone.

The funny thing is that the Granta list of novelists is the reason I have this story collection, now. I was working on a novel when they called and told me about the list, and they needed a short story within a month. I didn’t have any stories, so I got out the five or six that I’d abandoned for some reason, and started working on them. I finished one of them for Granta, but I’d gotten interested in the others. Time had passed, and I saw ways to fix them. I stopped writing the novel, and got used to the short-story pace again, and wrote some new stories, and then I realized I might have a book.

Your stories (as well as your novels) span the globe and time. In addition to your many present-day and domestic settings, in your two collections of stories we experience retired men in Paris, a soldier in London during World War II, diplomats in Saudi Arabia, aristocrats in South America, and a Connecticut power plant in 1975. These stories carry the authority of experience. Can you talk a bit about your research process, as well as how you push beyond the maxim “Write what you know.”

I think you have to find an emotional connection to the story, to make anyone else care about it, but I would find writing only what I know to be limiting. All of the stories you mention above came from fragments of things people told me—about pranks on the pager phones in a power plant, for example, or about inheritance in Argentina. I start with those details, which feel real, and seem promising, and start writing around them. I tend to write what seems like the emotional story between the characters first, and then check the parts I got wrong, and add more details later. I’ve been thinking about a novel lately that would require more advance research than anything I’ve done so far, and I don’t know how that process might change if I do it.

Andre Dubus used to say that he liked to read the first line of every story in a collection, and then go back and read each story in its entirety in the order the author had selected. How important has both sequencing and overall cohesion been to you with your two collections?

I spent a lot of time on the sequence, and wrote an essay about it for Amazon, which you can read here. It’s felt, with both collections, like a puzzle with only one answer. There are stories that need to go early and stories that can’t go early. It’s what makes it a book, and gives it a shape.

Speaking of Dubus, Half in Love has two stories that feature the same characters; a technique Dubus was fond of employing. In your story “Garrison Junction,” we meet the young couple Gina and Chase. They are unmarried and Gina is newly pregnant. Then we meet the couple again near the end of the collection, but they are much older this time and the exploits of their teenage daughter, Amy, take center stage, as noted in the story’s title, “Thirteen & a Half.” Can you talk about these two stories and your decision to link them?

It wasn’t a decision I made until the stories were in a book, and could resonate with each other within the book. I think it was a tiny step toward novel-writing, at a time when I wasn’t sure I could write a novel. There were two other linked stories in my original draft of the collection, but they didn’t really fit, and I took them out and they became the first two chapters of Liars and Saints.

In addition to your writing being exceptionally powerful in its concision, you have a great technical gift for plotting and pacing. Can you take your story “Red from Green” (which first appeared in the New Yorker) and explain why you chose not to resolve the story within the envelope of the central action—fifteen-year-old Sam Turner’s awkward rafting trip with her attorney father and a client—and instead pushed the action ahead by many months to end at the east coast boarding school Sam has left Montana to attend?

I wanted Sam to have time—for the consequences of her decision to leave home to have settled in, and for her understanding of what happened to have deepened, and taken on context. I needed her to grow up a little, before the story could end.

On the flip side of “Red from Green,” the action in “The Girlfriend”—where a father painfully questions the girlfriend of a boy who murdered his daughter—you have compressed the entire story into a very short span of time (with some flashbacks) and in one location (a hotel room). Why did you use this technique here rather than, say, jump ahead at the end of the story and show the father reflecting back on the confrontation in the hotel?

I wanted him to discover what he discovers about his daughter’s death in the course of the story. If he were reflecting back, then the story would begin with him already knowing everything. I wanted him to come to the information as the reader does. As a reader, you think it’s one kind of story, and then it’s another—and in a way, that’s true for him, too.

After thinking about your story “Red from Green,” I realized how many of your stories include attorneys. In addition to that story, I can think of “Tome,” “Garrison Junction,” “Kite Whistler Aquamarine,” “Thirteen & a Half,” and “Travis, B.” Did I miss any? Why do you think you’ve included so many attorneys in your writing?

The easy answer is that I grew up with a lot of lawyers around, so it’s a job for which I have a vocabulary at hand. But the deeper answer is that being a small-town lawyer with a varied practice—there are no corporate lawyers in the stories—is a job that puts you in contact with extraordinary circumstances. Ordinary people deal with lawyers only when something crucial and possibly extreme is happening in their lives, and so it’s rich territory for stories. And lawyers are themselves good storytellers, or should be: they have to build a narrative and convince an audience that it’s true.

When fantasizing about an “ideal reader” in his 1968 interview with the Paris Review, John Updike said: “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a country-ish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.” Do you have any sort of “ideal reader” or audience in mind when you write?

That’s a lovely quotation, but I don’t really have an imaginary reader like that. I write sometimes for people I know, putting in things that might please or entertain them, but I don’t think about them all the time. When it’s going well, I just feel like I’m inside the story, figuring out what the people in it do next.

Is there someone outside your field who inspires you?

Chad Ochocinco of the Cincinnati Bengals. And the acrobats in Cirque du Soleil.

Your stories are set all over the country and all over the world, but where is your ideal workspace?

I have a chair that tilts back like an astronaut chair, and a desk that comes over on an arm, with a laptop on it. I started using that set-up because it was easier on my shoulders to be in the tilted-back position, but now I can’t compose anything beyond an email if I’m sitting up straight. Sideways on a couch with a lap desk works in a pinch.

For Further Reading

- Don’t miss Celeste Ng’s review of Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It here on FWR.

- If you’re shopping for a copy of Meloy’s latest collection, click here to buy from your local indie bookseller.

So you didn’t win the auction for Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter. (Ahem–if you did, we know a great literary site that you could support as well!)

For everyone else without a spare $254,500, we offer this interview with McCarthy in theWall Street Journal, available online for free. In the wide-ranging conversation, McCarthy discusses the film adaptation of his novel The Road, how his relationship with his 11-year-old son influences his work, the violence in his work, and much more:

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different. [...]

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

The painter Agnes Martin said to Susan York, a sculptor who’d sought out Martin as a mentor: “Never have children. Do not live the middle-class life. Never do anything that will take away from your work.” York wrote about it in 2005 (the conversation happened in 1983). I was 32 in 2005, I still “had time.” And yet the words burned on my brain even then.

In my thesis workshop at my MFA program, our director, Eileen Pollack, said to us one night, you know, if you want to go do something else, or be something else besides a writer, that’s fine. My first reaction was to be insulted by this idea—I had wanted to be (assumed) I would be a writer since I was a child; I wasn’t, at the cusp of my career, going to get sucked into something else. I was vehement in my belief that there was no something else. I realize now that the wounded feeling was mostly fear: fear that I’d fail and need to invent a something else, and fear that my desire to have a family would swallow me whole: that I would indeed choose a life of parenting because it would be harder to fail at that than at being a writer.

And now, a few years out of the program, I’m no longer insulted. Outside of the bubble where I had to be, intensely, a writer, I understand that Eileen’s comment was permission to live a life with room for other identities, even if those identities take us away from our work. Work can be your life, but your life can (and I’d argue, should be) bigger than your work. As writers, sometimes we stumble into things that fulfill us that aren’t writing—the most discussed being parenthood, but also other professions, and occupations—and that to shut them out because we are so intent on being writers with a capital W is to perhaps miss out on these other things in life that often make us better writers–because they deepen the range of our experience and emotions, because they show us a new perspective, or simply because they give us money or time or some other sort of permission we need to write. Or, as the case may be, not to write.

I am still a little afraid. I’ve already made my choice to be both a mother and a writer, and so far it’s as “bizarre, and confusing, and stressful” as Chung anticipates. Yet it’s also wonderful, enlightening, and, so far, good for my identity as a writer.

I’m curious to hear how others answer these questions in their own lives. The comments on Chung’s essay are a good place to start:

Is your work your life, or do you need or desire a life beyond writing?

Is it true, as Chung says, that “making art is selfish”?