Competing Interests: An Interview with Christopher Hebert
by Michael Shilling
Debut novelist Christopher Hebert on writing a revolution, the industry of passive characters, and people who put trees above human life.
Michael Shilling’s first novel, Rock Bottom, was published in 2009 by Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, and in 2011 will be staged as a musical by theLandless Theater Company in Washington DC. His stories have appeared in The Sun, Fugue, andOther Voices, and he has written criticism for The Stranger. He lives in Seattle, where he is a Lecturer at Seattle University. In his free time, he writes a bunch of stuff, and plays the drums in a soul band.
Debut novelist Christopher Hebert on writing a revolution, the industry of passive characters, and people who put trees above human life.
Daniel Orozco’s debut has been a long time coming. Now fans of his prizewinning fiction can enjoy an entire collection, Orientation: And Other Stories. Michael Shilling calls him in Idaho to talk geographic love letters, G. Gordon Liddy, and the peculiar challenge of gimmicks.
While Flannery O’Connor combined humor and sadism in ways as mysterious as they are effective, to me, the way she was able to render horrific actions in people and still somehow make me sympathetic is her greatest achievement—even more so when she breaks out of the highly symbolic framings of tales such as “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People.” While these are incredible stories, less-known ones, in which characters transcend her desire to make them mere chess pieces and instead achieve a full humanity, are where she truly scorches. “A View of the Woods” is […]
Michael Shilling’s interview with Percival’s Planet author Michael Byers delves into the fascinating characters – both historical and imagined – that populate Byers’ novel, which deals with the 1930s discovery of Pluto. Shilling says, “Reminiscent of such lightweights as James and Welty, Byers’ work shines with studied and infuried illuminations of the imperfect spirit; he can map out this process of inner grappling with a lovely, intense, and disciplined artistry.”