Christine Sneed's Blog, page 2
December 2, 2018
Q and A with Jon Chopan, Veterans Crisis Hotline
1. From the book jacket:
The twelve stories of Veterans Crisis Hotline offer a meditation on the relationship between war and righteousness and consider the impossible distance between who men are and who they want to be. A veteran working at the hotline listens to the stories men tell when they need someone to hear their voices, when they need to access a language for their pain. Two men search for the head of a decapitated Iraqi civilian so that they might absolve themselves of the atrocities of war, a Marine hunts for the man who raped his girlfriend, and a teenage son replaces his dead father on the battlefield. With a quick wit and offbeat humor, Jon Chopan takes us from the banks of the Euphrates to the bars and VFW halls of the Rust Belt, providing insight into the Iraq War and its enduring impact on those who volunteered to fight in it.
2. These are some of the best short stories I've read in a long while, and also some of the best stories about war and its effects on both soldiers and civilians. How did you decide to write a collection about these characters, all of whom are either soldiers and/or the children of soldiers?
It started with the final story in the collection. That’s where I met Tully Fitzsimmons, who I would, after finishing that story, become somewhat obsessed with. It wasn’t that I wanted to write about war, and at first I refused to. I wanted to know what happened to him after he decided to go to Iraq and when he got home from the war. I had no intention of writing the war at all, but at some point the stories froze up, they wouldn’t move, Tully didn’t want to talk about home anymore and needed to talk about the war. Long before that, my most trusted readers told me that I was going to have to write about it, but I refused to believe them until the stories told me that I had no choice. Originally this was a linked story collection all about Tully and his going to war and then his time home.
3. After the (stunning) first story, "Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1," which focuses on a veteran who works for the eponymous crisis hotline, each subsequent story is narrated bysomeone with whom the narrator of "Crisis Hotline" has spoken. Did you decide on this structure for the collection before you began or did it come later?
This links up nicely to the last question. As I said, I thought it was just going to be Tully’s story. I hadn’t imagined it being anyone else. But then I wrote the opening story, which was actually the last one I wrote. In the original construction of the collection, the opening story was the last piece and the last story first piece. I sent the manuscript to trusted readers, to Black Lawrence Press (they published my first book), and everyone said that it doesn’t work, that the arc isn’t strong enough, he doesn’t really change, there is no development. That sucked, of course, but it got me thinking about what was happening in the stories, if they were distinct enough to be separate voices. I was still interested in them being linked by more than just the subject, but I realized that a single character wasn’t going to cut it. That final story grew out of an HBO documentary about the crisis hotline, Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1, which looked at the hotline side of things, the way the hotline woks and the people that work there. That got me thinking about the men on the other end of the line and what those phone calls might sound like. I suspected they didn’t come out like short stories, the calls, but that struck me as interesting, the idea that my stories were men who needed to talk, men who needed someone, even if it was only a stranger, to hear their stories. I suppose that’s how I thought about Tully, that he was talking to me, that he needed me to listen and tell his story, so the change didn’t actually seem that big, seemed pretty natural. So, basically, the structure was a creative response to a story problem, which is that the story I thought I was telling was not working and subsequently was not actually the story I was telling.
4. I noticed you earned a creative nonfiction MFA, and your first book, Pulled from the River, is a memoir (which Donald Ray Pollack said is the best memoir he's ever read). What drew you to fiction for your second book?
I always liked fiction. I was just really bad at it when I was younger. I came to writing late in my undergraduate years. I wasn’t one of those kids who always wanted to be a writer. I probably dreamt most about being in the NHL (even though I had no talent to speak of), or otherwise I didn’t have much of a plan. I went to college because my father, who was drafted into Vietnam, said I didn’t have a choice. I actually got my BA in American History. I liked the subject and really liked a few of the professors I had. But I think history is a natural complement to creative writing, nonfiction or fiction, because it is the story of who we are or who we are because of who we were. My first book grew out of the old advice to “write what you know,” and all I knew was Rochester, NY, or my version of it at least. I knew my father and my brother and the guys I grew up with. I knew these things and they became the center for me, some way to tell a story without trying to impose meaning and plot on it in the way young writers sometimes force meaning and plot. My first book taught me how to write, I think, and how to love a character enough to trust that they would tell their own story without my pushing them around.
5. Some of the stories in Veterans Crisis Hotline take place in a theater of war; others are set in the U.S. after the soldiers have returned home. Was it more difficult to write the stories that took place in country?
It was definitely most challenging to write characters in the war. I was so afraid and resistant about doing it. What right did I have, I figured. Who would ever believe in the stories I was telling? Maybe that was a bit juvenile. Maybe it was a bit conservative. But at some point, as I said, the stories froze up and I needed to do it or the whole thing was going to fall apart. I was adjuncting at the time and had a student who registered for one of my summer sections of freshman comp who had just come back from Iraq. We got close that summer, smoking buddies, and he was the first person I interviewed. Anyhow, short version, this student was super helpful and forthcoming and finally made me comfortable enough to interview some of my buddies from back home who had also been in the war. I also did research, read books, watched films and documentaries, tried to ingest as much as I could. I knew I wasn’t going to need even 10% of it, but I felt like I needed to get the feeling, the sense of it, so that I could try my hardest to get the feel of it right. I didn’t worry too much about the minutia, but I wanted the stories to feel right, true. I ingested as much as I could and then trusted that my characters were telling it best they could, trusted that they would get me as close to the truth as they could and that that would be enough.
6. What/who are some or your main literary influences?
Denis Johnson is one. Jesus’ Son had a major impact on the way I approached VCH and thought about it and dreamed it in my sleep. Tim O’Brien, for the war of course, but really more because his work is so beautiful and full of a kind of magic. I can’t explain what he does, but I wish I could do it, wanted to do it in my work, somehow. Those are two of the biggest influences. But there are plenty of writers who have had a profound impact on my work: James Baldwin, Charles Wright, Brian Turner, Nami Mun, Rebecca Barry… I think anything I read and fall in love with, fiction, nonfiction, or poetry has a way of shaping and reshaping my ideas and my drive to get better.
JON CHOPAN is an associate professor of creative writing at Eckerd College. He received his BA and MA in American History from SUNY Oswego and his MFA from The Ohio State University. His first collection, Pulled From the River, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2012. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Hotel Amerika, Post Road, Epiphany, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2017 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for his collection Veterans Crisis Hotline, which was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in October 2018.
The twelve stories of Veterans Crisis Hotline offer a meditation on the relationship between war and righteousness and consider the impossible distance between who men are and who they want to be. A veteran working at the hotline listens to the stories men tell when they need someone to hear their voices, when they need to access a language for their pain. Two men search for the head of a decapitated Iraqi civilian so that they might absolve themselves of the atrocities of war, a Marine hunts for the man who raped his girlfriend, and a teenage son replaces his dead father on the battlefield. With a quick wit and offbeat humor, Jon Chopan takes us from the banks of the Euphrates to the bars and VFW halls of the Rust Belt, providing insight into the Iraq War and its enduring impact on those who volunteered to fight in it.
2. These are some of the best short stories I've read in a long while, and also some of the best stories about war and its effects on both soldiers and civilians. How did you decide to write a collection about these characters, all of whom are either soldiers and/or the children of soldiers?
It started with the final story in the collection. That’s where I met Tully Fitzsimmons, who I would, after finishing that story, become somewhat obsessed with. It wasn’t that I wanted to write about war, and at first I refused to. I wanted to know what happened to him after he decided to go to Iraq and when he got home from the war. I had no intention of writing the war at all, but at some point the stories froze up, they wouldn’t move, Tully didn’t want to talk about home anymore and needed to talk about the war. Long before that, my most trusted readers told me that I was going to have to write about it, but I refused to believe them until the stories told me that I had no choice. Originally this was a linked story collection all about Tully and his going to war and then his time home.
3. After the (stunning) first story, "Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1," which focuses on a veteran who works for the eponymous crisis hotline, each subsequent story is narrated bysomeone with whom the narrator of "Crisis Hotline" has spoken. Did you decide on this structure for the collection before you began or did it come later?
This links up nicely to the last question. As I said, I thought it was just going to be Tully’s story. I hadn’t imagined it being anyone else. But then I wrote the opening story, which was actually the last one I wrote. In the original construction of the collection, the opening story was the last piece and the last story first piece. I sent the manuscript to trusted readers, to Black Lawrence Press (they published my first book), and everyone said that it doesn’t work, that the arc isn’t strong enough, he doesn’t really change, there is no development. That sucked, of course, but it got me thinking about what was happening in the stories, if they were distinct enough to be separate voices. I was still interested in them being linked by more than just the subject, but I realized that a single character wasn’t going to cut it. That final story grew out of an HBO documentary about the crisis hotline, Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1, which looked at the hotline side of things, the way the hotline woks and the people that work there. That got me thinking about the men on the other end of the line and what those phone calls might sound like. I suspected they didn’t come out like short stories, the calls, but that struck me as interesting, the idea that my stories were men who needed to talk, men who needed someone, even if it was only a stranger, to hear their stories. I suppose that’s how I thought about Tully, that he was talking to me, that he needed me to listen and tell his story, so the change didn’t actually seem that big, seemed pretty natural. So, basically, the structure was a creative response to a story problem, which is that the story I thought I was telling was not working and subsequently was not actually the story I was telling.
4. I noticed you earned a creative nonfiction MFA, and your first book, Pulled from the River, is a memoir (which Donald Ray Pollack said is the best memoir he's ever read). What drew you to fiction for your second book?
I always liked fiction. I was just really bad at it when I was younger. I came to writing late in my undergraduate years. I wasn’t one of those kids who always wanted to be a writer. I probably dreamt most about being in the NHL (even though I had no talent to speak of), or otherwise I didn’t have much of a plan. I went to college because my father, who was drafted into Vietnam, said I didn’t have a choice. I actually got my BA in American History. I liked the subject and really liked a few of the professors I had. But I think history is a natural complement to creative writing, nonfiction or fiction, because it is the story of who we are or who we are because of who we were. My first book grew out of the old advice to “write what you know,” and all I knew was Rochester, NY, or my version of it at least. I knew my father and my brother and the guys I grew up with. I knew these things and they became the center for me, some way to tell a story without trying to impose meaning and plot on it in the way young writers sometimes force meaning and plot. My first book taught me how to write, I think, and how to love a character enough to trust that they would tell their own story without my pushing them around.
5. Some of the stories in Veterans Crisis Hotline take place in a theater of war; others are set in the U.S. after the soldiers have returned home. Was it more difficult to write the stories that took place in country?
It was definitely most challenging to write characters in the war. I was so afraid and resistant about doing it. What right did I have, I figured. Who would ever believe in the stories I was telling? Maybe that was a bit juvenile. Maybe it was a bit conservative. But at some point, as I said, the stories froze up and I needed to do it or the whole thing was going to fall apart. I was adjuncting at the time and had a student who registered for one of my summer sections of freshman comp who had just come back from Iraq. We got close that summer, smoking buddies, and he was the first person I interviewed. Anyhow, short version, this student was super helpful and forthcoming and finally made me comfortable enough to interview some of my buddies from back home who had also been in the war. I also did research, read books, watched films and documentaries, tried to ingest as much as I could. I knew I wasn’t going to need even 10% of it, but I felt like I needed to get the feeling, the sense of it, so that I could try my hardest to get the feel of it right. I didn’t worry too much about the minutia, but I wanted the stories to feel right, true. I ingested as much as I could and then trusted that my characters were telling it best they could, trusted that they would get me as close to the truth as they could and that that would be enough.
6. What/who are some or your main literary influences?
Denis Johnson is one. Jesus’ Son had a major impact on the way I approached VCH and thought about it and dreamed it in my sleep. Tim O’Brien, for the war of course, but really more because his work is so beautiful and full of a kind of magic. I can’t explain what he does, but I wish I could do it, wanted to do it in my work, somehow. Those are two of the biggest influences. But there are plenty of writers who have had a profound impact on my work: James Baldwin, Charles Wright, Brian Turner, Nami Mun, Rebecca Barry… I think anything I read and fall in love with, fiction, nonfiction, or poetry has a way of shaping and reshaping my ideas and my drive to get better.
JON CHOPAN is an associate professor of creative writing at Eckerd College. He received his BA and MA in American History from SUNY Oswego and his MFA from The Ohio State University. His first collection, Pulled From the River, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2012. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Hotel Amerika, Post Road, Epiphany, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2017 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for his collection Veterans Crisis Hotline, which was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in October 2018.
Published on December 02, 2018 07:48
October 15, 2018
Q and A with Ian Morris, Author of Simple Machines
1. Tell us a little about your new novel.
Simple Machines is a novel of myth and ritual, telling a story of Wisconsin dating from the Ojibwa flood myth to the end of the twentieth century, all within the frame of a year in the life of Tomas Zimmermann, the book’s narrator, as he spends a last summer at home on an island in Lake Superior, then leaves for college in Madison, where he falls in with an unusual, and ultimately destructive, crowd.
2. I’d call Simple Machines a coming of age story that’s also, as one of your blurbs states, picaresque. I’m curious about how this story took root—is it based on people you know?
Though I didn’t model the character of Ernst after my own father, there is one ritual that recurs throughout the novel that is central to my original conception of the book, and that is Tom and his father riding bikes together in circles around the island. My own father and I rode together from when I was five until when he died fifty years later. When I was a kid, he had to wait for me to catch up, and then there came a time when I was in my teens when I got to be faster than him, and that was a very fraught period for both of us.
For tens of thousands of miles and tens of thousands of hours we rode together. Mostly, those rides felt rote and obligatory for both of us, I think, but there was also an intimacy and an ease of communication. That’s what I was trying to convey.
The picaresque aspects of the novel were inspired by growing up and going to school in Madison. My family moved there just as the anti-Vietnam-War movement was turning violent. It was a time of very vivid personages, and that tradition carried over when I was in college. Most of the characters in the second part of the novel were based on other students I observed from a distance on campus and wondered about and made up stories about.
3. You write so lyrically but also accessibly about the Wisconsin landscape—I’m guessing you knew before you started this novel that it would be set in Wisconsin; can you comment on how important setting is in your writing overall? Your first novel, When Bad Things Happen to Rich People, was set in Chicago and Lake Forest, and I'm guessing setting was also of primary importance to you as you told that story.
Yes, absolutely, although I was steeped in aspects of northern North-American landscapes and culture when I was growing up—particularly winter days spent outdoors—I didn’t truly recognize how distinctive and compelling it all was as a setting for writing until I moved to the south for four years for graduate school. I remember sweating while walking to class one early November morning in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and thinking, “What the hell? It’s thirty degrees back home.”
What the characters in both my novels have in common is that they don’t have money. They are not poor, but they struggle to get by. People in those circumstances tend to be observant of the details of day to day life around them.
4. There are postmodern flourishes in Simple Machines that I loved—lists, excerpts from of a play, song lyrics—do these different forms simply appear organically in your mind as you're writing?
I doubt any literary movement was ever more thoroughly reviled than Postmodernism—and that was while it was happening! Now it’s worse. But I first started writing in college in the eighties, and I was exhilarated by so much of what was coming out in those days that my hands used to literally shake when I was reading and writing. Lorrie Moore was one of my first workshop teachers, and Self Help is still one of my favorite short story collections. I loved Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes. A lot of Postmodern fiction was inspired by Borges, whom I also loved, and by Joseph Conrad’s frame tales and Turn of the Screw by Henry James and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Marguerite Duras. All of that cleverness really excited me. I would urge writers and readers of this intertextual, post-mash-up age in which we live these days to revisit the literature of the eighties.
5. This novel is told in 27 briskly paced chapters—is this the structure you envisioned from the start? Or did it gradually reveal itself as your progressed in your writing?
Oh, thank you for saying “briskly.” Shoehorning hundreds of years of history into a year in the life of a character was an act of trench warfare that required a lot of revision. So, it was something of a relief to me, when I started to read the book back to myself, that the action actually moved along pretty well. I based the circumstances of Ernst and Tomas on the Icarus myth, so their fates were predestined. Everything else was more or less a surprise to me.
6. Tomas’s father Ernst’s character is informed by his intimate experience with loss and disappointment—was he a more challenging character to write than any of the other principals?
In a lot of ways, his worldview was the most familiar. Anyone who grows up aspiring to be a great athlete or an artist is schooled in the mathematics of failure from an early age. Professional cycling at the time Ernst would’ve been at it was a very working-class sport, a lot of pain, a lot of long hours in the saddle for very little money, and a lot of lingering bitterness among athletes of different European countries following the war. Tomas understands how his father takes his life’s disappointments out on him. It’s a familiar dynamic, I think. The fear of failure is the hobgoblin of our aspirations, and it often appears to us in the form of our parents.
7. What are you working on now if you don't mind sharing a few details?
The book I am working on now is set in the comedy clubs of the Catskills in the 1960s. I was born in a small town along Route 17 in Upstate New York, where my folks grew up. That was the main highway from the city to what people who vacationed there used to call “the mountains.” I have wanted to write about this time and place for a long time and am very excited to be started.
Ian Morris is the managing editor of Punctuate: A Nonfiction Magazine, published by Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of the novel When Bad Things Happen to Rich People (Switchgrass Books, 2014), and is coeditor, with Joanne Diaz, The Little Magazine in America (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Simple Machines is a novel of myth and ritual, telling a story of Wisconsin dating from the Ojibwa flood myth to the end of the twentieth century, all within the frame of a year in the life of Tomas Zimmermann, the book’s narrator, as he spends a last summer at home on an island in Lake Superior, then leaves for college in Madison, where he falls in with an unusual, and ultimately destructive, crowd.
2. I’d call Simple Machines a coming of age story that’s also, as one of your blurbs states, picaresque. I’m curious about how this story took root—is it based on people you know?
Though I didn’t model the character of Ernst after my own father, there is one ritual that recurs throughout the novel that is central to my original conception of the book, and that is Tom and his father riding bikes together in circles around the island. My own father and I rode together from when I was five until when he died fifty years later. When I was a kid, he had to wait for me to catch up, and then there came a time when I was in my teens when I got to be faster than him, and that was a very fraught period for both of us.
For tens of thousands of miles and tens of thousands of hours we rode together. Mostly, those rides felt rote and obligatory for both of us, I think, but there was also an intimacy and an ease of communication. That’s what I was trying to convey.
The picaresque aspects of the novel were inspired by growing up and going to school in Madison. My family moved there just as the anti-Vietnam-War movement was turning violent. It was a time of very vivid personages, and that tradition carried over when I was in college. Most of the characters in the second part of the novel were based on other students I observed from a distance on campus and wondered about and made up stories about.
3. You write so lyrically but also accessibly about the Wisconsin landscape—I’m guessing you knew before you started this novel that it would be set in Wisconsin; can you comment on how important setting is in your writing overall? Your first novel, When Bad Things Happen to Rich People, was set in Chicago and Lake Forest, and I'm guessing setting was also of primary importance to you as you told that story.
Yes, absolutely, although I was steeped in aspects of northern North-American landscapes and culture when I was growing up—particularly winter days spent outdoors—I didn’t truly recognize how distinctive and compelling it all was as a setting for writing until I moved to the south for four years for graduate school. I remember sweating while walking to class one early November morning in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and thinking, “What the hell? It’s thirty degrees back home.”
What the characters in both my novels have in common is that they don’t have money. They are not poor, but they struggle to get by. People in those circumstances tend to be observant of the details of day to day life around them.
4. There are postmodern flourishes in Simple Machines that I loved—lists, excerpts from of a play, song lyrics—do these different forms simply appear organically in your mind as you're writing?
I doubt any literary movement was ever more thoroughly reviled than Postmodernism—and that was while it was happening! Now it’s worse. But I first started writing in college in the eighties, and I was exhilarated by so much of what was coming out in those days that my hands used to literally shake when I was reading and writing. Lorrie Moore was one of my first workshop teachers, and Self Help is still one of my favorite short story collections. I loved Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes. A lot of Postmodern fiction was inspired by Borges, whom I also loved, and by Joseph Conrad’s frame tales and Turn of the Screw by Henry James and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Marguerite Duras. All of that cleverness really excited me. I would urge writers and readers of this intertextual, post-mash-up age in which we live these days to revisit the literature of the eighties.
5. This novel is told in 27 briskly paced chapters—is this the structure you envisioned from the start? Or did it gradually reveal itself as your progressed in your writing?
Oh, thank you for saying “briskly.” Shoehorning hundreds of years of history into a year in the life of a character was an act of trench warfare that required a lot of revision. So, it was something of a relief to me, when I started to read the book back to myself, that the action actually moved along pretty well. I based the circumstances of Ernst and Tomas on the Icarus myth, so their fates were predestined. Everything else was more or less a surprise to me.
6. Tomas’s father Ernst’s character is informed by his intimate experience with loss and disappointment—was he a more challenging character to write than any of the other principals?
In a lot of ways, his worldview was the most familiar. Anyone who grows up aspiring to be a great athlete or an artist is schooled in the mathematics of failure from an early age. Professional cycling at the time Ernst would’ve been at it was a very working-class sport, a lot of pain, a lot of long hours in the saddle for very little money, and a lot of lingering bitterness among athletes of different European countries following the war. Tomas understands how his father takes his life’s disappointments out on him. It’s a familiar dynamic, I think. The fear of failure is the hobgoblin of our aspirations, and it often appears to us in the form of our parents.
7. What are you working on now if you don't mind sharing a few details?
The book I am working on now is set in the comedy clubs of the Catskills in the 1960s. I was born in a small town along Route 17 in Upstate New York, where my folks grew up. That was the main highway from the city to what people who vacationed there used to call “the mountains.” I have wanted to write about this time and place for a long time and am very excited to be started.
Ian Morris is the managing editor of Punctuate: A Nonfiction Magazine, published by Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of the novel When Bad Things Happen to Rich People (Switchgrass Books, 2014), and is coeditor, with Joanne Diaz, The Little Magazine in America (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Published on October 15, 2018 08:01
October 9, 2018
Q and A with Don Evans, author of An Off-White Christmas
1. Tell us a little about your story collection.
There are 12 short stories, all set on or around Christmas. The voice and settings for each story vary, such that over the course of the collection I cover a fair bit of American geography and take on a range of views (young, old; male, female). The holiday sets up heightened drama for stories that often involve family, and lives on or below the surface less than what the characters might have imagined for themselves.
The magic and pressure of Christmas leans into the characters, resulting, in these stories, a reexamination of self, including the people and places that constitute self-identity. Pride is part of it. I don't want to make the collection sound overly cerebral, though it comes off that way when explaining what it all adds up to. I put a premium on fun and laughter in literature, and I hope also there is plenty of that. Mostly, Christmas is used as a unifying theme for stories in which characters find themselves at a crossroads and stare at their lives hoping for answers.
2. One of your stories, “Tiny Flakes of Bone,” is about characters on a serious Las Vegas gambling binge that's what I'd also have to describe as bacchanalian--it's so much (guilty) fun.
The characters, or at least the core truth of the characters, come from my life--people I've known, people I've heard about, people like some iteration of myself at some time in my life. The usual disclaimer here is that this is fiction--any resemblance and so forth. And of course that's true. In choosing to fictionalize the material, I gave myself license to exaggerate or tamp down or invent characteristics, quirks, and so forth. In some cases, it's the best of the people I've known that interest me; in other cases, it's the worst of the people I've known that interest me. The fiction here allows me to step outside myself and use observations collected over time to create something more cohesive than true experience.
3. Your first book, the novel Good Money After Bad, also features characters whose lives are seriously (and sometimes hilariously) affected by gambling--what is it about this subject that inspires you as a writer?
My younger self was a gambler, in fact it was such an obsession that I can now see I self-identified as such. I was drawn not just to the risk, or the opportunity for quick riches, but for what it said about me that I did this. It's been a long time since I gambled, and in most ways I wish I'd never done it. But I continue to be at least marginally fascinated with the world of the gambler, which from my experience is a world of continuous tension.
When you're gambling as I did, which is to say risking WAY MORE than you can afford, life is a serial drama with enormous highs and lows. Lots of climaxes and whatever the opposite of a climax is. Cliffhangers at the end of every episode. Danger and heartbreak; lying and cheating. I remember most of it with distaste, but I do remember the bonds I formed fondly--bonds with a large variety of unlikely companions and cohorts I would never have formed outside my own gambling world.
I used to meet one of my bookies, Hank, at Ann Sathers on Belmont near Clark Street--I'd give him an envelope, or he'd give me an envelope, and the winner would buy breakfast. One day, he asked me to meet at his girlfriend's place--this posh apartment on State Street near Lincoln Park--and Hank, a handsome, middle-aged, silver-haired low-level mob guy--was doing laundry. "Don't fucking tell anybody you saw me washing my girlfriend's lingerie," he ordered me. That kind of glimpse into lives, often incongruent with the traditional gambling narrative you see on television or read about in novels, is what attracts me.
4. As both a short story writer and a novelist, would you say you prefer one form over the other, and why?
I suppose at heart I'm a novelist. All 12 of these stories are on the long side, probably because over time I kept envisioning more--more details, more characters, more plot. One criticism I received was that "sometimes short stories need to be short." It's an adequate observation. The short story writers I admire most--Denis Johnson, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, Joy Williams, Amy Hempel, and so forth and so on, have the capacity to trim stories to their essence.
Toby, who was my teacher at Syracuse, once said of his novella The Barrack's Thief, that he challenged himself to see "how much weight every sentence can bear." I've kept that in mind throughout my writing career, especially as regards short stories. But I have a tendency to want my characters to roam, and this instinct lends itself better to a longer form. With short stories, or any story, I think I want the story to tell me when enough is enough. During the process of revision, I often make the prose leaner and faster. Better. So I wind up with a short story when I feel like this is all there is, anything more would detract.
5. The title story of course centers on Christmas--and is a subversive look at the holiday and family dynamics. What inspired it?
An Off-White Christmas comes from a line in the title story, and it describes a Chicago landscape as it is rather than it's lazily labeled. Throughout the collection, it serves as a metaphor for lives that do not necessarily possess ideal qualities or even mirror one's own self-image. The phrase came to me just looking outside the window and hearing somebody say something about it being a white Christmas and thinking, "Not really."
6. The illustrations in this book are beautiful. What can you tell me about the choice to illustrate the stories?
I knew this would be a modest publication, but I also wanted it to have some lasting value. I collect books. I cherish books for a variety of reasons, mostly the writing but also for their merits as objects. I've got some of the Folio Society Books that pair a classic story with a world class illustrator, and I go back to those books time and again. I've two boxed sets of Sherlock Holmes--the spines of the short stories set form a silhouette of Watson; the spines of the novels set form a silhouette of Holmes. I love looking at those books on my shelf, and often tell people who happen to be in my living room, "You have to see this!" I greatly admire Hannah Jennings as an artist and designer, and was ecstatic that she was willing to interpret the stories through her lens. It became a collaboration, and I am always much more motivated when others have a stake in my project. In the end, I'd like for people--at least a few--to keep my book on their shelf and every once in a while tell somebody, "You've got to see this!"
7.What are you working on now if you don't mind telling us?
Here's my problem. For the longest time now, since my son Dusty was born, I've been juggling a bunch of different projects. I like all of them so much I can't focus, and so I have drafts of a variety of novels. It's a terrible way to work. Everything is unfinished. At the rate I'm going, I'll have six or eight novels, all completed around the same time. But I'll be 80 years old.
There are a variety of reasons why I've been stuck like this for so long, many that are solvable. I'm trying to change my work habits back to what they were when I was younger. I am close to finishing a novel about a T-ball player whose friend is kicked off the team for bad behavior. Like a lot of what I do, I've chosen the subject matter because I'm just so fond of similar stories that have preceded it, but also because I think I have a perspective that adds something to the body of work.
There are 12 short stories, all set on or around Christmas. The voice and settings for each story vary, such that over the course of the collection I cover a fair bit of American geography and take on a range of views (young, old; male, female). The holiday sets up heightened drama for stories that often involve family, and lives on or below the surface less than what the characters might have imagined for themselves.
The magic and pressure of Christmas leans into the characters, resulting, in these stories, a reexamination of self, including the people and places that constitute self-identity. Pride is part of it. I don't want to make the collection sound overly cerebral, though it comes off that way when explaining what it all adds up to. I put a premium on fun and laughter in literature, and I hope also there is plenty of that. Mostly, Christmas is used as a unifying theme for stories in which characters find themselves at a crossroads and stare at their lives hoping for answers.
2. One of your stories, “Tiny Flakes of Bone,” is about characters on a serious Las Vegas gambling binge that's what I'd also have to describe as bacchanalian--it's so much (guilty) fun.
The characters, or at least the core truth of the characters, come from my life--people I've known, people I've heard about, people like some iteration of myself at some time in my life. The usual disclaimer here is that this is fiction--any resemblance and so forth. And of course that's true. In choosing to fictionalize the material, I gave myself license to exaggerate or tamp down or invent characteristics, quirks, and so forth. In some cases, it's the best of the people I've known that interest me; in other cases, it's the worst of the people I've known that interest me. The fiction here allows me to step outside myself and use observations collected over time to create something more cohesive than true experience.
3. Your first book, the novel Good Money After Bad, also features characters whose lives are seriously (and sometimes hilariously) affected by gambling--what is it about this subject that inspires you as a writer?
My younger self was a gambler, in fact it was such an obsession that I can now see I self-identified as such. I was drawn not just to the risk, or the opportunity for quick riches, but for what it said about me that I did this. It's been a long time since I gambled, and in most ways I wish I'd never done it. But I continue to be at least marginally fascinated with the world of the gambler, which from my experience is a world of continuous tension.
When you're gambling as I did, which is to say risking WAY MORE than you can afford, life is a serial drama with enormous highs and lows. Lots of climaxes and whatever the opposite of a climax is. Cliffhangers at the end of every episode. Danger and heartbreak; lying and cheating. I remember most of it with distaste, but I do remember the bonds I formed fondly--bonds with a large variety of unlikely companions and cohorts I would never have formed outside my own gambling world.
I used to meet one of my bookies, Hank, at Ann Sathers on Belmont near Clark Street--I'd give him an envelope, or he'd give me an envelope, and the winner would buy breakfast. One day, he asked me to meet at his girlfriend's place--this posh apartment on State Street near Lincoln Park--and Hank, a handsome, middle-aged, silver-haired low-level mob guy--was doing laundry. "Don't fucking tell anybody you saw me washing my girlfriend's lingerie," he ordered me. That kind of glimpse into lives, often incongruent with the traditional gambling narrative you see on television or read about in novels, is what attracts me.
4. As both a short story writer and a novelist, would you say you prefer one form over the other, and why?
I suppose at heart I'm a novelist. All 12 of these stories are on the long side, probably because over time I kept envisioning more--more details, more characters, more plot. One criticism I received was that "sometimes short stories need to be short." It's an adequate observation. The short story writers I admire most--Denis Johnson, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, Joy Williams, Amy Hempel, and so forth and so on, have the capacity to trim stories to their essence.
Toby, who was my teacher at Syracuse, once said of his novella The Barrack's Thief, that he challenged himself to see "how much weight every sentence can bear." I've kept that in mind throughout my writing career, especially as regards short stories. But I have a tendency to want my characters to roam, and this instinct lends itself better to a longer form. With short stories, or any story, I think I want the story to tell me when enough is enough. During the process of revision, I often make the prose leaner and faster. Better. So I wind up with a short story when I feel like this is all there is, anything more would detract.
5. The title story of course centers on Christmas--and is a subversive look at the holiday and family dynamics. What inspired it?
An Off-White Christmas comes from a line in the title story, and it describes a Chicago landscape as it is rather than it's lazily labeled. Throughout the collection, it serves as a metaphor for lives that do not necessarily possess ideal qualities or even mirror one's own self-image. The phrase came to me just looking outside the window and hearing somebody say something about it being a white Christmas and thinking, "Not really."
6. The illustrations in this book are beautiful. What can you tell me about the choice to illustrate the stories?
I knew this would be a modest publication, but I also wanted it to have some lasting value. I collect books. I cherish books for a variety of reasons, mostly the writing but also for their merits as objects. I've got some of the Folio Society Books that pair a classic story with a world class illustrator, and I go back to those books time and again. I've two boxed sets of Sherlock Holmes--the spines of the short stories set form a silhouette of Watson; the spines of the novels set form a silhouette of Holmes. I love looking at those books on my shelf, and often tell people who happen to be in my living room, "You have to see this!" I greatly admire Hannah Jennings as an artist and designer, and was ecstatic that she was willing to interpret the stories through her lens. It became a collaboration, and I am always much more motivated when others have a stake in my project. In the end, I'd like for people--at least a few--to keep my book on their shelf and every once in a while tell somebody, "You've got to see this!"
7.What are you working on now if you don't mind telling us?
Here's my problem. For the longest time now, since my son Dusty was born, I've been juggling a bunch of different projects. I like all of them so much I can't focus, and so I have drafts of a variety of novels. It's a terrible way to work. Everything is unfinished. At the rate I'm going, I'll have six or eight novels, all completed around the same time. But I'll be 80 years old.
There are a variety of reasons why I've been stuck like this for so long, many that are solvable. I'm trying to change my work habits back to what they were when I was younger. I am close to finishing a novel about a T-ball player whose friend is kicked off the team for bad behavior. Like a lot of what I do, I've chosen the subject matter because I'm just so fond of similar stories that have preceded it, but also because I think I have a perspective that adds something to the body of work.
Published on October 09, 2018 11:56
August 15, 2018
Q and A with Michael Marcus, author of #1 Son and Other Stories
Jon Hess has this to say about
#1 Son and Other Stories
, Michael Marcus’s debut story collection: “Michael Marcus takes us on a wild adventure through the darkest depths of addiction, sexuality, deceit, and depravity with a raw grace and eloquence that brings to mind the voices of Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries, Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting, Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son, and Junot Diaz in Drown. Not for a moment do we question our narrator’s truth as he depicts larger-than-life characters who are in a constant struggle to survive. Marcus has an engaging voice as an author that is matched by his raucous humor. To read #1 Son is an experience of monumental proportions. A powerful, fresh new voice has taken center stage on the literary scene.”
1. What inspired you to write these stories (which are based on true events)? Was the experience at all therapeutic?
I had an English teacher in 9th grade who encouraged the class to journal every day, a diary of our daily experiences. He told us all it was confidential and was for his eyes only, and that he would grade for spelling and grammar only. I wrote of my experiences related to stealing, drug use, parties, alcohol, Quaaludes, mushrooms, coke, and working and stealing at my father’s auction gallery. This teacher helped set the stage for the prose and poetry that I would eventually write.
The stories in #1 Son are all based on true events; some of these events and conversations took place over the course of many years, but were combined to offer more character description, story resonance, and arc. Feel free to Google the details in this book or … ask my mom! She’s one of very few living eyewitnesses at this point.
I took a couple of writing workshops (and many improv classes) that helped me access a lot of this material as well. I barely finished high school and have no former schooling as far as writing goes. It just happened. It was cathartic, but it also brought up some trauma. And I mean real trauma. That’s a catchword that comes up frequently in today’s therapeutic and 12 step settings and I believe it’s lost its luster.
But where do you go if you grew up in the mix of drugs, porn, and violence? I’ll tell you where: hell on earth and unable to connect…On the other hand not facing all of this has brought me back to relapsing many times. So I did a lot of 12 step work and therapy, and continue to, I’m under no illusions that I’m healed, but I am on the road, way down the road of recovery.
2. What has been the response from family members, friends, and strangers to #1 Son?
My immediate family (my mom) was a little offended, but got over it quickly and realized it was imperative for my own recovery. My extended family, cousins, aunts, and uncles, seem to be OK with it. My stepmother and stepbrother who basically inherited everything, well, I haven’t spoke to or heard from them since the book came out.
But I was the black sheep in their eyes, most of the time, anyway. My stepmother who got full control of my father’s estate made sure I got very little when he died. And he had and has a very successful jewelry operation. When he died, I was grateful for the pittance she said he left at first (which now I believe is bullshit--she had power of attorney and she could have come way more correct with the money), but then over time I was enraged. I thought about how he never paid child support or alimony. I still have some bitterness there but not as dominating and overwhelming.
But strangers love this book! A lot of great reviews on Amazon and kudos at live readings!
3. Your father was a larger-than-life character and you said during the episode you recorded for Marc Maron’s WTF podcast that you realized after he died that he was a horrible person – while he was alive, did you ever think it would be best to cut all ties with him?
Yes, he was a horrible person. In today’s climate if he were outed, he would be ruined, for his lifetime of crime and hideous behavior towards women and children. Here’s something: many years ago while he was slipping into Alzheimer’s and dementia, he bragged about a murder he brokered. I knew the original story, but had no idea he was that deeply involved, and I couldn’t keep the secret. I told the police about it years ago but nothing was ever proven, and he had fallen fully into Alzheimer’s and dementia, so there was no way they could corroborate the details I shared.
I did cut all ties with him and he did the same to me on and off for years. I tried to mend things and accept him and the situation between us, but it was futile. Daddy shit: I know plenty who suffer from it on some level. It's like going back to alcohol and drugs … insanity. So many times I guess I wanted it to work out but as the old song goes “looking for love in all the wrong places.”
4. You work in the addiction field as a 12-step group facilitator. How does this work affect what you write? Did it greatly influence your process when you sat down to write the stories in #1 Son?
Absolutely. Over the course of time, writing, re-writing and editing #1 Son and Other Stories, and also working in recovery, helped me really access my insanity and delusional thinking around my behaviors, emotions and belief systems. I see different stages of recovery in all of the clients I’ve been in these groups with.
Also, this isn’t just about my active addiction, but how am I stone cold sober and clean? That’s when the real fucking demons surface, when my fear is driving me around town, and it’s like I’m stuck in a haunted Uber with my thoughts and there seems to be no way out! But there is, and for me it’s been a combination of 12 steps, therapy, and a healthier lifestyle across the board.
5. I don’t think anyone would disagree that we’re in an era where violence is being celebrated and in some quarters, men are only considered real men if they’re willing to be violent—look at the NRA, the endless war in the Middle East, the rise of white supremacy. It’s clear in #1 Son that you have intimate knowledge of violence and violent people and I’m curious about how you react to these trends now as opposed to during your formative years.
It’s unsettling, to say the least. American culture has forced beliefs of what it means to be a man on me for as long as I can remember. GI Joes, cowboys and Indians, boxing, fighting, war, and guns, toy guns, BB guns, and the real deal. Be it machismo, racism, xenophobia, the extreme importance of getting laid as quickly as possible, or just that good ol’ homegrown nationalistic idea of “America’s the best, fuck all the rest!”
To those I say, OK, please list and define what makes America the best, and get back to me, because I ain’t feeling it. And I'm not going anywhere either. That being said, god forbid you speak up, because deep in the political/cultural fabric is that “Love it or leave it” ideology, and if you question those principles you’re a commie, or a liberal, or a traitor. It’s like that old saying, “I’d move to another country, but I’d be the victim of our foreign policy there as well.”
It’s going to take a while to turn this ship around. I also loathe when I’m labeled or marked as macho or privileged or not awake to what the fuck is going on. One night I had a member of the Improv community tell me that I couldn’t fill in on a team because they didn’t want a ‘cis-gendered white male’—instead, they were looking for people of color, women, transgendered people. Needless to say, that’s exclusionary, and I’ve never been a person who would say or do that to someone else. And I’m hearing this from someone who doesn’t know anything about me. I grew up in Los Angeles, went to Hollywood High, but was also a ward of the court system—I could go on.
The bottom line, whether it’s the left or right, I don’t judge people that harshly about their behaviors or belief systems. For me it’s always about being an example. I try to bring experience, solutions, and a deep understanding of the fact we are in a warped society. Me constantly complaining about it would create zero results. So it’s about showing up! Voting, protesting, fuck…sometimes just sitting quietly and not reacting to petty shit so quickly.
6. Who are some of the writers who most inspired you?
Donald Goines he wrote about the street rawness of addiction like no other. Donald Barthelme—his short stories are fascinating and borderless. Eddie Bunker—his writing about his childhood and the never-ending bleakness of relapsing into crime and drugs and death and recidivism being the only option. Denis Johnson—Jesus’ Son…fantastic. Jack Kerouac— On the Road ; Charles Bukowski—more raw street survival and the mundane grind of trying to make it in the American machine, only to end up as a broken cog! John Fante—I’m a sucker for L.A. stories; David Foster Wallace—his books of short stories and Infinite Jest captivated me for YEARS—I still go back. Iceberg Slim—more horrific childhood shit and the horrific behavior of a really damaging upbringing, SE Hinton—come on man, The Outsiders—I grew up around dudes like that. Hunter S. Thompson…so many more…
7. What are you working on now?
I’m working on a book about my experiences of working as a sober companion, part truth and part fiction, as well as a TV and movie project.
Michael Marcus was born in Freeport, Long Island, or, as he lovingly refers to it, “Cirrhosis by the Sea.” His lineage consists of a long line of restless, irritable, and discontent New Yorkers, which, in Marcus’s view, makes them some of the most irritable people on the planet. His years of drug and alcohol abuse (along with improv, storytelling, and a plethora of extremely undesirable jobs), have created the kind of prose you always wanted to hear but were too afraid to ask for. Marcus admits he’s been beaten to within an inch of his life, due to his own horrific bad decisions. And he’s happy to get to write about it."#1 Son And Other Stories chronicles some of these events. He was raised in an extremely dysfunctional environment that was rife with crime, abuse, misogyny, racism, and a host of other horrifying principles, ideals and belief systems. #1 Son And Other Stories explores these issues through the eyes of a man who miraculously managed to survive it all and didn't end up becoming the people who raised him.
1. What inspired you to write these stories (which are based on true events)? Was the experience at all therapeutic?
I had an English teacher in 9th grade who encouraged the class to journal every day, a diary of our daily experiences. He told us all it was confidential and was for his eyes only, and that he would grade for spelling and grammar only. I wrote of my experiences related to stealing, drug use, parties, alcohol, Quaaludes, mushrooms, coke, and working and stealing at my father’s auction gallery. This teacher helped set the stage for the prose and poetry that I would eventually write.
The stories in #1 Son are all based on true events; some of these events and conversations took place over the course of many years, but were combined to offer more character description, story resonance, and arc. Feel free to Google the details in this book or … ask my mom! She’s one of very few living eyewitnesses at this point.
I took a couple of writing workshops (and many improv classes) that helped me access a lot of this material as well. I barely finished high school and have no former schooling as far as writing goes. It just happened. It was cathartic, but it also brought up some trauma. And I mean real trauma. That’s a catchword that comes up frequently in today’s therapeutic and 12 step settings and I believe it’s lost its luster.
But where do you go if you grew up in the mix of drugs, porn, and violence? I’ll tell you where: hell on earth and unable to connect…On the other hand not facing all of this has brought me back to relapsing many times. So I did a lot of 12 step work and therapy, and continue to, I’m under no illusions that I’m healed, but I am on the road, way down the road of recovery.
2. What has been the response from family members, friends, and strangers to #1 Son?
My immediate family (my mom) was a little offended, but got over it quickly and realized it was imperative for my own recovery. My extended family, cousins, aunts, and uncles, seem to be OK with it. My stepmother and stepbrother who basically inherited everything, well, I haven’t spoke to or heard from them since the book came out.
But I was the black sheep in their eyes, most of the time, anyway. My stepmother who got full control of my father’s estate made sure I got very little when he died. And he had and has a very successful jewelry operation. When he died, I was grateful for the pittance she said he left at first (which now I believe is bullshit--she had power of attorney and she could have come way more correct with the money), but then over time I was enraged. I thought about how he never paid child support or alimony. I still have some bitterness there but not as dominating and overwhelming.
But strangers love this book! A lot of great reviews on Amazon and kudos at live readings!
3. Your father was a larger-than-life character and you said during the episode you recorded for Marc Maron’s WTF podcast that you realized after he died that he was a horrible person – while he was alive, did you ever think it would be best to cut all ties with him?
Yes, he was a horrible person. In today’s climate if he were outed, he would be ruined, for his lifetime of crime and hideous behavior towards women and children. Here’s something: many years ago while he was slipping into Alzheimer’s and dementia, he bragged about a murder he brokered. I knew the original story, but had no idea he was that deeply involved, and I couldn’t keep the secret. I told the police about it years ago but nothing was ever proven, and he had fallen fully into Alzheimer’s and dementia, so there was no way they could corroborate the details I shared.
I did cut all ties with him and he did the same to me on and off for years. I tried to mend things and accept him and the situation between us, but it was futile. Daddy shit: I know plenty who suffer from it on some level. It's like going back to alcohol and drugs … insanity. So many times I guess I wanted it to work out but as the old song goes “looking for love in all the wrong places.”
4. You work in the addiction field as a 12-step group facilitator. How does this work affect what you write? Did it greatly influence your process when you sat down to write the stories in #1 Son?
Absolutely. Over the course of time, writing, re-writing and editing #1 Son and Other Stories, and also working in recovery, helped me really access my insanity and delusional thinking around my behaviors, emotions and belief systems. I see different stages of recovery in all of the clients I’ve been in these groups with.
Also, this isn’t just about my active addiction, but how am I stone cold sober and clean? That’s when the real fucking demons surface, when my fear is driving me around town, and it’s like I’m stuck in a haunted Uber with my thoughts and there seems to be no way out! But there is, and for me it’s been a combination of 12 steps, therapy, and a healthier lifestyle across the board.
5. I don’t think anyone would disagree that we’re in an era where violence is being celebrated and in some quarters, men are only considered real men if they’re willing to be violent—look at the NRA, the endless war in the Middle East, the rise of white supremacy. It’s clear in #1 Son that you have intimate knowledge of violence and violent people and I’m curious about how you react to these trends now as opposed to during your formative years.
It’s unsettling, to say the least. American culture has forced beliefs of what it means to be a man on me for as long as I can remember. GI Joes, cowboys and Indians, boxing, fighting, war, and guns, toy guns, BB guns, and the real deal. Be it machismo, racism, xenophobia, the extreme importance of getting laid as quickly as possible, or just that good ol’ homegrown nationalistic idea of “America’s the best, fuck all the rest!”
To those I say, OK, please list and define what makes America the best, and get back to me, because I ain’t feeling it. And I'm not going anywhere either. That being said, god forbid you speak up, because deep in the political/cultural fabric is that “Love it or leave it” ideology, and if you question those principles you’re a commie, or a liberal, or a traitor. It’s like that old saying, “I’d move to another country, but I’d be the victim of our foreign policy there as well.”
It’s going to take a while to turn this ship around. I also loathe when I’m labeled or marked as macho or privileged or not awake to what the fuck is going on. One night I had a member of the Improv community tell me that I couldn’t fill in on a team because they didn’t want a ‘cis-gendered white male’—instead, they were looking for people of color, women, transgendered people. Needless to say, that’s exclusionary, and I’ve never been a person who would say or do that to someone else. And I’m hearing this from someone who doesn’t know anything about me. I grew up in Los Angeles, went to Hollywood High, but was also a ward of the court system—I could go on.
The bottom line, whether it’s the left or right, I don’t judge people that harshly about their behaviors or belief systems. For me it’s always about being an example. I try to bring experience, solutions, and a deep understanding of the fact we are in a warped society. Me constantly complaining about it would create zero results. So it’s about showing up! Voting, protesting, fuck…sometimes just sitting quietly and not reacting to petty shit so quickly.
6. Who are some of the writers who most inspired you?
Donald Goines he wrote about the street rawness of addiction like no other. Donald Barthelme—his short stories are fascinating and borderless. Eddie Bunker—his writing about his childhood and the never-ending bleakness of relapsing into crime and drugs and death and recidivism being the only option. Denis Johnson—Jesus’ Son…fantastic. Jack Kerouac— On the Road ; Charles Bukowski—more raw street survival and the mundane grind of trying to make it in the American machine, only to end up as a broken cog! John Fante—I’m a sucker for L.A. stories; David Foster Wallace—his books of short stories and Infinite Jest captivated me for YEARS—I still go back. Iceberg Slim—more horrific childhood shit and the horrific behavior of a really damaging upbringing, SE Hinton—come on man, The Outsiders—I grew up around dudes like that. Hunter S. Thompson…so many more…
7. What are you working on now?
I’m working on a book about my experiences of working as a sober companion, part truth and part fiction, as well as a TV and movie project.
Michael Marcus was born in Freeport, Long Island, or, as he lovingly refers to it, “Cirrhosis by the Sea.” His lineage consists of a long line of restless, irritable, and discontent New Yorkers, which, in Marcus’s view, makes them some of the most irritable people on the planet. His years of drug and alcohol abuse (along with improv, storytelling, and a plethora of extremely undesirable jobs), have created the kind of prose you always wanted to hear but were too afraid to ask for. Marcus admits he’s been beaten to within an inch of his life, due to his own horrific bad decisions. And he’s happy to get to write about it."#1 Son And Other Stories chronicles some of these events. He was raised in an extremely dysfunctional environment that was rife with crime, abuse, misogyny, racism, and a host of other horrifying principles, ideals and belief systems. #1 Son And Other Stories explores these issues through the eyes of a man who miraculously managed to survive it all and didn't end up becoming the people who raised him.
Published on August 15, 2018 12:01
April 2, 2018
Q and A with Kathleen Rooney about LILLIAN BOXFISH TAKES A WALK
From the book jacket:
"She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy’s to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, “in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.” Now it’s the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It’s chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier now―her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl―but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed―and has not.
"A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop. Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young."
1. Your novel’s structure is both present-day, of-the-moment action interspersed with many detailed flashbacks; was this structure with you from the beginning or did it evolve as you progressed farther into the writing of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk?
KR: Outlining is my jam. I can’t imagine writing a novel without an outline—to me, that would be like trying to build a house without any blueprint. So I knew from the outset that the book would be built around her New Year’s Eve 1984 walk, and I quickly made a Google Map into which I kept dropping pins for the major incidents of both Lillian’s past and present. The map that’s on the frontispiece of the finished novel is actually a (much more artistic and attractive) version of that initial map.
2. Your title character is based on a real person, Margaret Fishback, a poet and highly successful ad woman who worked for many years at R.H. Macy’s—many of the scenes in the novel are imagined, i.e. works of fiction, I’m guessing—though perhaps I’m wrong: are most of them based on events you read about in Fishback’s journals?
KR: I got to be the first non-archivist to work with the archive of Margaret Fishback, the real-life inspiration for Lillian Boxfish. And while the majority of the incidents from the book’s “past” portions (from 1926- the early 1980s) are largely based on real incidents, a lot of them are not. For example, the scene where Lillian marches into her boss’s office and demands to be paid equally to the men at Macy’s is pure fantasy on my part. Ditto the cocktail party scene where she has her verbal showdown with her co-worker Olive. And all the 1984 walk encounters are totally made-up. The walk, really, was the fictional key that let me unlock the story, and write it in a way that would be engaging as fiction (and not just inert reportage of actual events).
3. There’s a great line that I keep thinking about, one that occurs at the end of Chapter 21: “The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.” Would you say this is as much your philosophy as it is Lillian’s?
KR: Heck yes. Curiosity is my favorite emotion, followed closely by wonder. If I ever lost the ability to feel either one, I fear it might be fatal. I teach and I love it when my students are curious, and I try to create an environment that rewards curiosity and wondering.
4. There are many terrific and surprising details in this novel, one of which is the story behind the Macy’s red star logo. What was something else that you were particularly excited to learn as you were working on Lillian Boxfish?
KR: Ah, research is my favorite phase of any project and I got to learn so many fantastic things. It’s so hard to pick just one other thing I was excited to learn, but I’ll go with another one that I ended up including in the book. The parks of New York City, back when Lillian Boxfish would have arrived there, had little signs reminding people how to behave that were rhyming couplets:
Let no one say and say it to your shame
That all was beauty here until you came.
This seems like an instructive guideline for when one is not only in a park, but just in general.
5. What was Anthony Antolini’s (Margaret Fishback’s son), reaction to this novel? I think you told me he read it before it was published.
KR: Antony Antolini is a bit of an angel, if you ask me. I’m grateful to him for realizing how important his mother’s life and work were and subsequently giving her archives to Duke University where people like me can come and work with them.
Back in 2007 when I first began to work with the Fishback materials, I dropped him a note to let him know what I was doing (but at that point, I didn’t really know what I was doing). A little under 10 years later, I wrote him again, on that very same email thread, to tell him that the project was a novel and would be appearing in 2017. Understandably, he expressed concern about how I had chosen to depict this character based on his mom. I offered to let him read it in advance of publication and he took me up on it, and to my immense relief, he enjoyed and wished me well with it.
Also, a fun side note: it was an un-copy-edited version, and he and his wife Anne Greenleaf were kind enough to find numerous errors and send me corrections. So if readers find the book particularly well copy-edited and error-free, I have to acknowledge that it’s in no small part to the two of them.
6. What are you working on now, if you don’t mind sharing a few details about it?
KR: I have a couple of projects that are close to completion, both of them novels, but the one I’ll talk about here is a manuscript about World War I, currently titled An Instinct. Like Lillian Boxfish, it’s based on a true story, or really two intersecting true stories: one about Charles Whittlesey of the Lost Battalion and one about Cher Ami, a messenger pigeon who helped to save Whittlesey and his men in October of 1918, just before the end of the war. During the 1920s and 1930s, every school kid would have known those names, but World War II came along and eclipsed the tragedy of World War I with even greater atrocities. It’s been fascinating to learn about and try to bring life to their forgotten histories.
A founding editor of Rose Metal Press http://rosemetalpress.com/ and a founding member of Poems While You Wait http://poemswhileyouwait.tumblr.com/, Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and the forthcoming The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018) . With Eric Plattner, she is the co-editor of Rene Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Married to the writer Martin Seay, she lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul University. Follow her @KathleenMRooney
"She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy’s to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, “in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.” Now it’s the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It’s chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier now―her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl―but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed―and has not.
"A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop. Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young."
1. Your novel’s structure is both present-day, of-the-moment action interspersed with many detailed flashbacks; was this structure with you from the beginning or did it evolve as you progressed farther into the writing of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk?
KR: Outlining is my jam. I can’t imagine writing a novel without an outline—to me, that would be like trying to build a house without any blueprint. So I knew from the outset that the book would be built around her New Year’s Eve 1984 walk, and I quickly made a Google Map into which I kept dropping pins for the major incidents of both Lillian’s past and present. The map that’s on the frontispiece of the finished novel is actually a (much more artistic and attractive) version of that initial map.
2. Your title character is based on a real person, Margaret Fishback, a poet and highly successful ad woman who worked for many years at R.H. Macy’s—many of the scenes in the novel are imagined, i.e. works of fiction, I’m guessing—though perhaps I’m wrong: are most of them based on events you read about in Fishback’s journals?
KR: I got to be the first non-archivist to work with the archive of Margaret Fishback, the real-life inspiration for Lillian Boxfish. And while the majority of the incidents from the book’s “past” portions (from 1926- the early 1980s) are largely based on real incidents, a lot of them are not. For example, the scene where Lillian marches into her boss’s office and demands to be paid equally to the men at Macy’s is pure fantasy on my part. Ditto the cocktail party scene where she has her verbal showdown with her co-worker Olive. And all the 1984 walk encounters are totally made-up. The walk, really, was the fictional key that let me unlock the story, and write it in a way that would be engaging as fiction (and not just inert reportage of actual events).
3. There’s a great line that I keep thinking about, one that occurs at the end of Chapter 21: “The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.” Would you say this is as much your philosophy as it is Lillian’s?
KR: Heck yes. Curiosity is my favorite emotion, followed closely by wonder. If I ever lost the ability to feel either one, I fear it might be fatal. I teach and I love it when my students are curious, and I try to create an environment that rewards curiosity and wondering.
4. There are many terrific and surprising details in this novel, one of which is the story behind the Macy’s red star logo. What was something else that you were particularly excited to learn as you were working on Lillian Boxfish?
KR: Ah, research is my favorite phase of any project and I got to learn so many fantastic things. It’s so hard to pick just one other thing I was excited to learn, but I’ll go with another one that I ended up including in the book. The parks of New York City, back when Lillian Boxfish would have arrived there, had little signs reminding people how to behave that were rhyming couplets:
Let no one say and say it to your shame
That all was beauty here until you came.
This seems like an instructive guideline for when one is not only in a park, but just in general.
5. What was Anthony Antolini’s (Margaret Fishback’s son), reaction to this novel? I think you told me he read it before it was published.
KR: Antony Antolini is a bit of an angel, if you ask me. I’m grateful to him for realizing how important his mother’s life and work were and subsequently giving her archives to Duke University where people like me can come and work with them.
Back in 2007 when I first began to work with the Fishback materials, I dropped him a note to let him know what I was doing (but at that point, I didn’t really know what I was doing). A little under 10 years later, I wrote him again, on that very same email thread, to tell him that the project was a novel and would be appearing in 2017. Understandably, he expressed concern about how I had chosen to depict this character based on his mom. I offered to let him read it in advance of publication and he took me up on it, and to my immense relief, he enjoyed and wished me well with it.
Also, a fun side note: it was an un-copy-edited version, and he and his wife Anne Greenleaf were kind enough to find numerous errors and send me corrections. So if readers find the book particularly well copy-edited and error-free, I have to acknowledge that it’s in no small part to the two of them.
6. What are you working on now, if you don’t mind sharing a few details about it?
KR: I have a couple of projects that are close to completion, both of them novels, but the one I’ll talk about here is a manuscript about World War I, currently titled An Instinct. Like Lillian Boxfish, it’s based on a true story, or really two intersecting true stories: one about Charles Whittlesey of the Lost Battalion and one about Cher Ami, a messenger pigeon who helped to save Whittlesey and his men in October of 1918, just before the end of the war. During the 1920s and 1930s, every school kid would have known those names, but World War II came along and eclipsed the tragedy of World War I with even greater atrocities. It’s been fascinating to learn about and try to bring life to their forgotten histories.
A founding editor of Rose Metal Press http://rosemetalpress.com/ and a founding member of Poems While You Wait http://poemswhileyouwait.tumblr.com/, Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and the forthcoming The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018) . With Eric Plattner, she is the co-editor of Rene Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Married to the writer Martin Seay, she lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul University. Follow her @KathleenMRooney
Published on April 02, 2018 14:38
December 26, 2017
Q and A with Patricia McNair About Her New Essay Collection AND THESE ARE THE GOOD TIMES
Patricia Ann McNair and I corresponded recently over email about her excellent new book,
And These Are The Good Times
, which she describes as "a collection of essays and brief memoir pieces; riffs, I like to think of them as. Dancing to the jukebox in dark taverns; saying goodbye to my father on the last morning of his life; having sex in the backseat of a car at a drive-in movie; drinking scotch in a nightclub in Havana and coffee at my kitchen table in Paris; making up stories on the run; flirting with boys on summer nights on a Chicago beach; finding the perfect sentence; gathering the entirety of my recently deceased brother's things in two plastic garbage bags—these are some of the moments I consider in these pages. Perhaps the subtitle sums it up best: 'A Chicago gal riffs on death, sex, life, dancing, writing, wonder, loneliness, place, family, faith, coffee, and the FBI (among other things).'”
1. In these essays, which are masterworks of voice and tone, you write about family, travels, sex, coming of age in the Midwest--when did you begin them? And did you see these essays from the start as distinct parts that would form the whole of a book?
First, can I say thank you so much for your kind words? I am so pleased that you find the voice and tone affective for these pieces. So many of them started in my journal, where I have a practice of sort of talking to myself; I guess that is where the voice evolves from. The first piece that I finished of these is actually the title essay, “And These Are the Good Times.” I started that piece in the late nineties, putting words on the page while I was listening to Michael Steinberg, one of the founders of the journal Fourth Genre. Michael is a sort of godfather of the type of creative narrative nonfiction I am fond of, and I was lucky to have him come and speak to a class of mine at Columbia College Chicago once. I don’t remember exactly what he was saying or reading, but it sparked this line in my head: “My father didn’t believe in jukeboxes.” And I had to write it down in that moment so I wouldn’t forget it (I forget much more than I commit to the page, I think.) And then the next line and the next led me to an exploration of the days from my childhood when I would meet my dad at the tavern around the corner from our house. And from that, how neighborhood bars always felt comfortable to me.
I did not know then that I would write a full collection. I wasn’t even that drawn to writing creative nonfiction; fiction has always been my favorite genre to write. I am a devotee of journal keeping, though, and sometimes—as I’ve alluded to—the things I start in my journal become these nonfiction pieces, these riffs. I would finish one or another and find a home for it, or I would get an invitation from someone to contribute an essay here or there. This collection is the work of about twenty years. But I don’t want to say it took me twenty years to write this book, because that isn’t exactly the way it happened. I’m not that slow.
But you know how it goes, Christine, as an industrious and prolific short story writer yourself. You look up from the desk one day and you realize that you have enough pieces to make a collection. And once you figure that out, you look at how you might revise them, rework them, gather and arrange them in order to make something that might read like a real book. The next step for me after I’d arranged and rearranged the ones I wanted to use was finding the holes in the narrative and in the content. What hadn’t I told yet? What wasn’t yet in these pages? And then I had to write those pieces.
2. Kind of a silly question but still one that I'm very curious to hear you reply to--how is writing nonfiction different for you than writing fiction? (I loved the short stories in your first book, The Temple of Air: Stories, and see And These Are The Good Times as a natural successor--both topically and craftwise.)
Thank you again, Christine. I so love your short stories, it is a real honor to hear you like mine, too! And I don’t think this is a silly question; I often wonder the same things when I read fiction and nonfiction from the same writer. What do they do the same? What is different? Do I recognize them in each of these genres? For me, I think, in nonfiction I am almost always writing in such a way that I keep finding new questions, even as I discover answers along the way. This sounds really airy-fairy, like creative hooha, doesn’t it? Let me start again.
The impetus for my nonfiction often comes from a memory that I carry around with me for a long time, even if it is a small, apparently ordinary moment.
And then what can happen is that I observe something in the present, or read something, or hear something on the radio or eavesdropping on the train, and it brings me back to that memory. A pattern starts to evolve—and it is the gathering of patterns that leads me to an essay. What do these things say about one another? What are these moments about (to me), as opposed to what exactly happened? These things—like this memory of how my 90-year-old uncle would tell me the same story over and over again, and how that came to mind when an old man told me a story in Czech (which I do not speak) in line at a grocery store in Prague one afternoon when I had been feeling particularly lonely, and then I thought about how my mother started to speak to me in a secret language of her own in the last days of her life.
And I listened to each of these people in order not to understand or even hear what they were saying, but to connect with them—these kinds of moments and things work together to lead me to both new understandings and to new questions, and that is where I find the heart of my nonfiction.
I think you are right to notice that my two books are similar. Topically, sometimes, I think I only have a few concerns: grief, loneliness, abandonment, sex, want. Is that it? And I find it intriguing how we can come at the same ideas from so many different angles. Fiction for me almost always starts with image. It might be an observation or memory like in my nonfiction, or it could be something wholly imagined. In any case, it is almost always something very visual. And in the images comes place and people and situation, and then, if I am patient and willing to write my way through false starts and real ones, a sort of momentum builds in the story. If this happens, and this happens, and this happens, then this. I write very scene-based fiction, and while there is a certain psychology that will emerge as my characters develop, I don’t think of my fiction as particularly psychological or driven by emotion. I think my nonfiction is more so, even though I use devices of scene to get to the psychology. The fiction tells what happened, and from that, a reader can discover what it is about. The nonfiction is almost always concerned with the “aboutness” of the piece in some way.
3. What/who are some of your primary influences as a writer?
I am constantly influenced and creatively propelled by new writers, people I discover along the way. You would be among these, Christine. Your work makes me wonder about the lives and choices of others, and that is delicious to me. Other contemporary Midwestern writers whose work makes me want to write: Christine Rice, Jack Driscoll, Eula Biss, Anne-Marie Oomen, Dinty W. Moore. So many. The books I read as an adult when I first started to take writing classes, the ones changed everything for me: The Bluest Eye, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Black Boy. Everything by Raymond Carver. Mary Gaitskill. These writers taught me not to strive for beauty in happiness and happy endings, but to find it in the ache, the disappointment, the yearning, the loss. This was a revelation to me. Flannery O’Connor. James Baldwin.
The book I carry with me when I travel is the small pocketbook-sized paperback The Best Short Stories of the Modern Age. Faulkner, Woolf, Lawrence Sargent Hall, Katherine Mansfield, Kafka. I mean, come on! Who wouldn’t want to write stories like these writers did?
And because to me influence and inspiration are closely linked, I’ll also say that I find inspiration in silence—long walks, sitting still, driving without the radio on. And from my students at Columbia College Chicago. Both from their work ethic (I cannot even imagine taking so many classes and doing all that homework anymore), and now more than ever--their willingness to experiment. Maybe this has to do with the rather disheartening realities we are all faced with these days, but my students have a deep trust in the possibilities of their stories and imagination that is exhilarating to me.
4. What was a surprising thing (either a factual or emotional discovery) that occurred as you wrote the essays in And These Are the Good Times?
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and have lived in the city for more than thirty years now. I have lived other places—sometimes for months like when I taught at Bath Spa University in the UK, other times for years like when I stayed in Iowa after I dropped out of a small liberal arts college there. But Chicago has been home for a huge majority of my life. Now I live in Edgewater, and I was born in Edgewater hospital, maybe a mile away from my apartment. I work just about half a mile from where my father had his office, the place I would work during the summers when I was an early teenager. I can see Foster Beach from my apartment windows, and that is where I used to hang out when I was in high school and wanted to meet cool city boys.
And despite how little I have physically moved from where I was “formed,” let’s say, I was totally surprised to realize how essential my Chicago-ness is to the nonfiction I write, in what I observe, in the way I consider the world. I always thought of myself as a Midwesterner, you know, sort of polite and openly friendly and a bit puritanical in my work ethic, unwavering in my wanting to please people, to make everyone comfortable. I always make too much food for parties—I am that kind of Midwesterner. My short stories usually take place in fictional small midwestern towns like those places I have lived for short periods of time, and that makes sense to me; the drama could shine vividly against the muted background of these small towns. But when the call came from Side Street Press (my publisher) for Chicago-centric fiction or nonfiction manuscripts, I looked through what I had been writing, and there Chicago was. There and there and there and there. Even in the pieces that are situated in other places, sometimes in other countries, what I saw and considered and experienced and wrote about were all deeply affected by my Chicago point of view.
Two pieces come to mind that illustrate this: “What You’ll Remember,” about my first trip to Cuba and how that trip would look when I returned home to a Chicago apartment and life that had lost its color to me, and “Coffee At the Kitchen Table,” about living in Paris for a few weeks playing housewife while my husband taught a class there; I was reminded of all the women I had known when I was a kid who lived similar experiences in the Chicago suburbs. Make breakfast, kiss hubby at the door, do the dishes, drink coffee at the kitchen table.
5. What are you working on now?
I am working on a novel, and am hoping to finish this draft by the end of January. (I keep telling people this so I can have some accountability.) Its working title is Climbing the House of God Hill, and it is set in the fictional small town of New Hope, where The Temple of Air was set. There are a couple of recurring characters and crossed storylines from that collection of stories that come up in the novel as well. It is about the possibility of a scandal between a fifteen-year-old girl and a number of men—a local pastor, her father’s best friend, an immigrant newly arrived in town, a fatherless boy. The story takes place shortly after September 11, 2001, when tensions and fear and distrust were all quite high. When I started the book a few years ago, we were in a different place as a country; there was a certain optimism for so many people, so I had to rely on imagination and memory to create this disturbing backdrop for the story. Now I can’t help but be aware of how many things I wrote and am writing that seem quite current and topical. What will this book look like in the glaring light of Trump and deregulation and hyper-evangelicalism and anti-immigration and #MeToo? I have to finish it to find out.
Patricia Ann McNair has lived 98 percent of her life in the Midwest. She’s managed a gas station, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and taught aerobics. Today she is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing of Columbia College Chicago. McNair’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in various anthologies, magazines, and journals including American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, Superstition Review, Word Riot, Hypertext, Prime Number, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and others. Her short story collection, The Temple of Air received the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Finalist Award.
1. In these essays, which are masterworks of voice and tone, you write about family, travels, sex, coming of age in the Midwest--when did you begin them? And did you see these essays from the start as distinct parts that would form the whole of a book?
First, can I say thank you so much for your kind words? I am so pleased that you find the voice and tone affective for these pieces. So many of them started in my journal, where I have a practice of sort of talking to myself; I guess that is where the voice evolves from. The first piece that I finished of these is actually the title essay, “And These Are the Good Times.” I started that piece in the late nineties, putting words on the page while I was listening to Michael Steinberg, one of the founders of the journal Fourth Genre. Michael is a sort of godfather of the type of creative narrative nonfiction I am fond of, and I was lucky to have him come and speak to a class of mine at Columbia College Chicago once. I don’t remember exactly what he was saying or reading, but it sparked this line in my head: “My father didn’t believe in jukeboxes.” And I had to write it down in that moment so I wouldn’t forget it (I forget much more than I commit to the page, I think.) And then the next line and the next led me to an exploration of the days from my childhood when I would meet my dad at the tavern around the corner from our house. And from that, how neighborhood bars always felt comfortable to me.
I did not know then that I would write a full collection. I wasn’t even that drawn to writing creative nonfiction; fiction has always been my favorite genre to write. I am a devotee of journal keeping, though, and sometimes—as I’ve alluded to—the things I start in my journal become these nonfiction pieces, these riffs. I would finish one or another and find a home for it, or I would get an invitation from someone to contribute an essay here or there. This collection is the work of about twenty years. But I don’t want to say it took me twenty years to write this book, because that isn’t exactly the way it happened. I’m not that slow.
But you know how it goes, Christine, as an industrious and prolific short story writer yourself. You look up from the desk one day and you realize that you have enough pieces to make a collection. And once you figure that out, you look at how you might revise them, rework them, gather and arrange them in order to make something that might read like a real book. The next step for me after I’d arranged and rearranged the ones I wanted to use was finding the holes in the narrative and in the content. What hadn’t I told yet? What wasn’t yet in these pages? And then I had to write those pieces.
2. Kind of a silly question but still one that I'm very curious to hear you reply to--how is writing nonfiction different for you than writing fiction? (I loved the short stories in your first book, The Temple of Air: Stories, and see And These Are The Good Times as a natural successor--both topically and craftwise.)
Thank you again, Christine. I so love your short stories, it is a real honor to hear you like mine, too! And I don’t think this is a silly question; I often wonder the same things when I read fiction and nonfiction from the same writer. What do they do the same? What is different? Do I recognize them in each of these genres? For me, I think, in nonfiction I am almost always writing in such a way that I keep finding new questions, even as I discover answers along the way. This sounds really airy-fairy, like creative hooha, doesn’t it? Let me start again.
The impetus for my nonfiction often comes from a memory that I carry around with me for a long time, even if it is a small, apparently ordinary moment.
And then what can happen is that I observe something in the present, or read something, or hear something on the radio or eavesdropping on the train, and it brings me back to that memory. A pattern starts to evolve—and it is the gathering of patterns that leads me to an essay. What do these things say about one another? What are these moments about (to me), as opposed to what exactly happened? These things—like this memory of how my 90-year-old uncle would tell me the same story over and over again, and how that came to mind when an old man told me a story in Czech (which I do not speak) in line at a grocery store in Prague one afternoon when I had been feeling particularly lonely, and then I thought about how my mother started to speak to me in a secret language of her own in the last days of her life.
And I listened to each of these people in order not to understand or even hear what they were saying, but to connect with them—these kinds of moments and things work together to lead me to both new understandings and to new questions, and that is where I find the heart of my nonfiction.
I think you are right to notice that my two books are similar. Topically, sometimes, I think I only have a few concerns: grief, loneliness, abandonment, sex, want. Is that it? And I find it intriguing how we can come at the same ideas from so many different angles. Fiction for me almost always starts with image. It might be an observation or memory like in my nonfiction, or it could be something wholly imagined. In any case, it is almost always something very visual. And in the images comes place and people and situation, and then, if I am patient and willing to write my way through false starts and real ones, a sort of momentum builds in the story. If this happens, and this happens, and this happens, then this. I write very scene-based fiction, and while there is a certain psychology that will emerge as my characters develop, I don’t think of my fiction as particularly psychological or driven by emotion. I think my nonfiction is more so, even though I use devices of scene to get to the psychology. The fiction tells what happened, and from that, a reader can discover what it is about. The nonfiction is almost always concerned with the “aboutness” of the piece in some way.
3. What/who are some of your primary influences as a writer?
I am constantly influenced and creatively propelled by new writers, people I discover along the way. You would be among these, Christine. Your work makes me wonder about the lives and choices of others, and that is delicious to me. Other contemporary Midwestern writers whose work makes me want to write: Christine Rice, Jack Driscoll, Eula Biss, Anne-Marie Oomen, Dinty W. Moore. So many. The books I read as an adult when I first started to take writing classes, the ones changed everything for me: The Bluest Eye, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Black Boy. Everything by Raymond Carver. Mary Gaitskill. These writers taught me not to strive for beauty in happiness and happy endings, but to find it in the ache, the disappointment, the yearning, the loss. This was a revelation to me. Flannery O’Connor. James Baldwin.
The book I carry with me when I travel is the small pocketbook-sized paperback The Best Short Stories of the Modern Age. Faulkner, Woolf, Lawrence Sargent Hall, Katherine Mansfield, Kafka. I mean, come on! Who wouldn’t want to write stories like these writers did?
And because to me influence and inspiration are closely linked, I’ll also say that I find inspiration in silence—long walks, sitting still, driving without the radio on. And from my students at Columbia College Chicago. Both from their work ethic (I cannot even imagine taking so many classes and doing all that homework anymore), and now more than ever--their willingness to experiment. Maybe this has to do with the rather disheartening realities we are all faced with these days, but my students have a deep trust in the possibilities of their stories and imagination that is exhilarating to me.
4. What was a surprising thing (either a factual or emotional discovery) that occurred as you wrote the essays in And These Are the Good Times?
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and have lived in the city for more than thirty years now. I have lived other places—sometimes for months like when I taught at Bath Spa University in the UK, other times for years like when I stayed in Iowa after I dropped out of a small liberal arts college there. But Chicago has been home for a huge majority of my life. Now I live in Edgewater, and I was born in Edgewater hospital, maybe a mile away from my apartment. I work just about half a mile from where my father had his office, the place I would work during the summers when I was an early teenager. I can see Foster Beach from my apartment windows, and that is where I used to hang out when I was in high school and wanted to meet cool city boys.
And despite how little I have physically moved from where I was “formed,” let’s say, I was totally surprised to realize how essential my Chicago-ness is to the nonfiction I write, in what I observe, in the way I consider the world. I always thought of myself as a Midwesterner, you know, sort of polite and openly friendly and a bit puritanical in my work ethic, unwavering in my wanting to please people, to make everyone comfortable. I always make too much food for parties—I am that kind of Midwesterner. My short stories usually take place in fictional small midwestern towns like those places I have lived for short periods of time, and that makes sense to me; the drama could shine vividly against the muted background of these small towns. But when the call came from Side Street Press (my publisher) for Chicago-centric fiction or nonfiction manuscripts, I looked through what I had been writing, and there Chicago was. There and there and there and there. Even in the pieces that are situated in other places, sometimes in other countries, what I saw and considered and experienced and wrote about were all deeply affected by my Chicago point of view.
Two pieces come to mind that illustrate this: “What You’ll Remember,” about my first trip to Cuba and how that trip would look when I returned home to a Chicago apartment and life that had lost its color to me, and “Coffee At the Kitchen Table,” about living in Paris for a few weeks playing housewife while my husband taught a class there; I was reminded of all the women I had known when I was a kid who lived similar experiences in the Chicago suburbs. Make breakfast, kiss hubby at the door, do the dishes, drink coffee at the kitchen table.
5. What are you working on now?
I am working on a novel, and am hoping to finish this draft by the end of January. (I keep telling people this so I can have some accountability.) Its working title is Climbing the House of God Hill, and it is set in the fictional small town of New Hope, where The Temple of Air was set. There are a couple of recurring characters and crossed storylines from that collection of stories that come up in the novel as well. It is about the possibility of a scandal between a fifteen-year-old girl and a number of men—a local pastor, her father’s best friend, an immigrant newly arrived in town, a fatherless boy. The story takes place shortly after September 11, 2001, when tensions and fear and distrust were all quite high. When I started the book a few years ago, we were in a different place as a country; there was a certain optimism for so many people, so I had to rely on imagination and memory to create this disturbing backdrop for the story. Now I can’t help but be aware of how many things I wrote and am writing that seem quite current and topical. What will this book look like in the glaring light of Trump and deregulation and hyper-evangelicalism and anti-immigration and #MeToo? I have to finish it to find out.
Patricia Ann McNair has lived 98 percent of her life in the Midwest. She’s managed a gas station, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and taught aerobics. Today she is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing of Columbia College Chicago. McNair’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in various anthologies, magazines, and journals including American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, Superstition Review, Word Riot, Hypertext, Prime Number, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and others. Her short story collection, The Temple of Air received the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Finalist Award.
Published on December 26, 2017 13:14
October 3, 2017
The Heart’s Most Urgent Commands: Scott Spencer Takes Dictation
He’s best known for Endless Love, a novel that immerses its readers in an intense, visceral meditation on first love, one much richer and more complex than either of the book's two film adaptations (the first, uniformly christened a disaster by critics, was directed by Franco Zeffirelli and released in 1981; the second, directed by Shana Feste and released earlier this year, might be even more of a critical whipping boy.) Book critics, however, agree that Scott Spencer is a writer of singular fluency and sensitivity. As he was once described by Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker, “Like John Updike, Spencer is a poet-celebrant of Eros.”
Along with his breakthrough, two-million-copy bestseller Endless Love and the other accomplished nine novels he has written as Scott Spencer, he has begun to write brainy horror novels, 2011’s Breed, and, 2014's, Brood. both of them published under the pen name Chase Novak. The man can do it all, I have to think (but if not, it’s probable that he’d be a quick study.)
A Ship Made of Paper, published in 2003, was the first book of his that I read, and like Endless Love, it was a National Book Award finalist. Ship is a powerful novel about infidelity, race, longing, and most of all, the inherent, often irreconcilable conflict between one’s sense of duty and the desires that reside in one’s private heart. I had never read anything quite like it and soon began giving copies to friends, but for reasons I can’t pinpoint, except for one – my reading of this novel coincided with a time of deep personal turmoil – I didn’t seek out any of Spencer’s other books until a few weeks ago, almost eight years after I read A Ship Made Of Paper.
Looking at books online, I came upon Willing, published in 2008. This funny, melancholic, wildly smart novel is narrated by a jilted 37-year-old journalist, Avery Jankowsky, who, when offered the opportunity to take part in a high-end Nordic sex tour (the participants pay a gasp-worthy $135,000 for the, er, ten-day pleasure), manages to wrangle a lucrative book contract out of a New York publisher before he departs for the trip’s first of several trysting points, Reykjavik, Iceland.
Once I began reading it, I couldn’t put Willing aside, though not for the reasons you might expect. There is more talk of the implications of sexual desire, taboo or otherwise, than actual descriptions of characters en flagrante delicto. Spencer is most interested in character and in the peculiar responsibilities related to affluence, physical beauty, and the enormous variety of amorous choices on offer when we open the Pandora’s Box of the Internet. Spencer also writes with breathtaking lucidity about how people confront, and when possible, overcome disappointment and frustrated desire.
After all but inhaling Willing, I quickly proceeded to Men in Black, an earlier novel, published in 1995, with no relation to the films of the same title, although the first MIB film release occurred around the same time as Spencer’s book’s publication. Here, as in Willing, we meet a confiding and self-deprecating first-person narrator, Sam Holland, a novelist of early promise who, failing to earn enough to pay his family of four’s bills from the books he publishes in his own name, has had to resort to penning titles he doesn’t care about: An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Pro Football and Traveling with Your Pet.
When the novel opens, Holland has just written another of these books under the pseudonym John Retcliffe, Visitors from Above, which contains made-up information about aliens and UFO sightings. The book takes off with the help of a New York radio shock-jock and conspiracy theorists who find doomsday messages embedded in its arbitrary patterns. Holland can finally pay his bills, but his marriage is on the verge of collapse, and his teenage son has run away from home, having discovered that his father has not been a faithful husband.
I read up on Spencer’s life after finishing Men in Black, wanting some context for his genius. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1945 and raised in Chicago. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin and also took classes at the University of Illinois and Roosevelt University for a time. There are frequent references to Chicago and the Midwest in Spencer’s novels, and Endless Love, still his most famous book, is set in Chicago. Waking the Dead (1986), also made into a film, a more successful one than either Endless Love adaptation, opens with the narrator learning that his girlfriend has been killed in Minneapolis by a car bomb. Today Spencer lives in upstate New York with his longtime girlfriend. He’s an avid tennis player and has two grown children.
What I love about Spencer’s books is that he doesn’t turn away when his characters are at their most distraught and abject. Instead, he sharpens his focus on their mournful faces, sometimes revealing a self-mocking smile. In addition to being a poet-celebrant of Eros like John Updike, Spencer resembles the older novelist in his nimble, comic exploration of human experience. I find a poignancy in Spencer’s books, however, that isn’t always as perceptible in Updike’s. While Updike frisks the human heart, Spencer pierces it with a quiver of exquisite arrows.
From Endless Love (copyright 1979, Alfred A. Knopf):
"When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time ruined everything I loved—I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably. But now, years have passed and the night of August 12, 1967, still divides my life.
It was a hot, dense Chicago night. There were no clouds, no stars, no moon. The lawns looked black and the trees looked blacker; the headlights of the cars made me think of those brave lights the miners wear, up and down the choking shaft. And on that thick and ordinary August night, I set fire to a house inside of which were the people I adored more than anyone else in the world, and whose home I valued more than the home of my parents.
"Before I set fire to their house I was hidden on their big wooden semicircular porch, peering into their window. I was in a state of grief. It was the agitated, snarling grief of a boy whose long rapturous story has not been understood."
From Willing (copyright 2008, Ecco [a Harper Collins imprint]):
"I’ve already mentioned my brief early marriage. When it ended I was not even twenty-four years old, and I had to wonder if I was embarking on an emotional journey similar to my mother’s, fated to lunge from one matrimonial catastrophe to the next. I had beginner’s luck in my relationships and already had in my little neural notebook of romantic memories a dozen gorgeous commencements. Now as the only divorced twenty-four-year-old I knew, I was worried if courtship and a ferocious few months were all I was made for. Beginner’s luck is fine if you get the hell out of there before it runs out; if you don’t, it’s worse than having no luck at all. I became careful to keep my entanglements solely with women who were manifestly unsuited to long-term engagements: women who were already married, or who seemed only mildly interested in me, or who lived a time zone or two away, or, as I aged, who were too young for me, which brings me to my relationship with Deirdre Feigenbaum, the end of which began the adventures I am about to impart."
This essay was originally published in the Chicago Tribune's literary supplement, Printers Row Journal.
Along with his breakthrough, two-million-copy bestseller Endless Love and the other accomplished nine novels he has written as Scott Spencer, he has begun to write brainy horror novels, 2011’s Breed, and, 2014's, Brood. both of them published under the pen name Chase Novak. The man can do it all, I have to think (but if not, it’s probable that he’d be a quick study.)
A Ship Made of Paper, published in 2003, was the first book of his that I read, and like Endless Love, it was a National Book Award finalist. Ship is a powerful novel about infidelity, race, longing, and most of all, the inherent, often irreconcilable conflict between one’s sense of duty and the desires that reside in one’s private heart. I had never read anything quite like it and soon began giving copies to friends, but for reasons I can’t pinpoint, except for one – my reading of this novel coincided with a time of deep personal turmoil – I didn’t seek out any of Spencer’s other books until a few weeks ago, almost eight years after I read A Ship Made Of Paper.
Looking at books online, I came upon Willing, published in 2008. This funny, melancholic, wildly smart novel is narrated by a jilted 37-year-old journalist, Avery Jankowsky, who, when offered the opportunity to take part in a high-end Nordic sex tour (the participants pay a gasp-worthy $135,000 for the, er, ten-day pleasure), manages to wrangle a lucrative book contract out of a New York publisher before he departs for the trip’s first of several trysting points, Reykjavik, Iceland.
Once I began reading it, I couldn’t put Willing aside, though not for the reasons you might expect. There is more talk of the implications of sexual desire, taboo or otherwise, than actual descriptions of characters en flagrante delicto. Spencer is most interested in character and in the peculiar responsibilities related to affluence, physical beauty, and the enormous variety of amorous choices on offer when we open the Pandora’s Box of the Internet. Spencer also writes with breathtaking lucidity about how people confront, and when possible, overcome disappointment and frustrated desire.
After all but inhaling Willing, I quickly proceeded to Men in Black, an earlier novel, published in 1995, with no relation to the films of the same title, although the first MIB film release occurred around the same time as Spencer’s book’s publication. Here, as in Willing, we meet a confiding and self-deprecating first-person narrator, Sam Holland, a novelist of early promise who, failing to earn enough to pay his family of four’s bills from the books he publishes in his own name, has had to resort to penning titles he doesn’t care about: An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Pro Football and Traveling with Your Pet.
When the novel opens, Holland has just written another of these books under the pseudonym John Retcliffe, Visitors from Above, which contains made-up information about aliens and UFO sightings. The book takes off with the help of a New York radio shock-jock and conspiracy theorists who find doomsday messages embedded in its arbitrary patterns. Holland can finally pay his bills, but his marriage is on the verge of collapse, and his teenage son has run away from home, having discovered that his father has not been a faithful husband.
I read up on Spencer’s life after finishing Men in Black, wanting some context for his genius. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1945 and raised in Chicago. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin and also took classes at the University of Illinois and Roosevelt University for a time. There are frequent references to Chicago and the Midwest in Spencer’s novels, and Endless Love, still his most famous book, is set in Chicago. Waking the Dead (1986), also made into a film, a more successful one than either Endless Love adaptation, opens with the narrator learning that his girlfriend has been killed in Minneapolis by a car bomb. Today Spencer lives in upstate New York with his longtime girlfriend. He’s an avid tennis player and has two grown children.
What I love about Spencer’s books is that he doesn’t turn away when his characters are at their most distraught and abject. Instead, he sharpens his focus on their mournful faces, sometimes revealing a self-mocking smile. In addition to being a poet-celebrant of Eros like John Updike, Spencer resembles the older novelist in his nimble, comic exploration of human experience. I find a poignancy in Spencer’s books, however, that isn’t always as perceptible in Updike’s. While Updike frisks the human heart, Spencer pierces it with a quiver of exquisite arrows.
From Endless Love (copyright 1979, Alfred A. Knopf):
"When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time ruined everything I loved—I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably. But now, years have passed and the night of August 12, 1967, still divides my life.
It was a hot, dense Chicago night. There were no clouds, no stars, no moon. The lawns looked black and the trees looked blacker; the headlights of the cars made me think of those brave lights the miners wear, up and down the choking shaft. And on that thick and ordinary August night, I set fire to a house inside of which were the people I adored more than anyone else in the world, and whose home I valued more than the home of my parents.
"Before I set fire to their house I was hidden on their big wooden semicircular porch, peering into their window. I was in a state of grief. It was the agitated, snarling grief of a boy whose long rapturous story has not been understood."
From Willing (copyright 2008, Ecco [a Harper Collins imprint]):
"I’ve already mentioned my brief early marriage. When it ended I was not even twenty-four years old, and I had to wonder if I was embarking on an emotional journey similar to my mother’s, fated to lunge from one matrimonial catastrophe to the next. I had beginner’s luck in my relationships and already had in my little neural notebook of romantic memories a dozen gorgeous commencements. Now as the only divorced twenty-four-year-old I knew, I was worried if courtship and a ferocious few months were all I was made for. Beginner’s luck is fine if you get the hell out of there before it runs out; if you don’t, it’s worse than having no luck at all. I became careful to keep my entanglements solely with women who were manifestly unsuited to long-term engagements: women who were already married, or who seemed only mildly interested in me, or who lived a time zone or two away, or, as I aged, who were too young for me, which brings me to my relationship with Deirdre Feigenbaum, the end of which began the adventures I am about to impart."
This essay was originally published in the Chicago Tribune's literary supplement, Printers Row Journal.
Published on October 03, 2017 14:39
August 10, 2017
RIVER UNDER THE ROAD: A Q and A with Scott Spencer
One of my favorite writers in any genre, Scott Spencer, has a terrific new novel out, River Under the Road, the first of a planned trilogy. I met him recently when he came to Evanston, Illinois to talk about River Under the Road and peppered him with some of the questions he graciously agreed to answer again for the Q and A below.
Spencer is probably best known for his two National Book Award-nominated novels Endless Love and A Ship Made Of Paper and some of his other novels that I also highly recommend are Willing, Men in Black, Waking the Dead, and The Rich Man's Table.
1. Several of your novels, including River Under the Road, take place in Leyden, a small town in the Hudson Valley, about 100 miles from New York City. What is it about this town and its inhabitants that most galvanizes you as a fiction writer?
In the town I have named Leyden I have a setting that has everything that interests me as a novelist—animal life both wild and domestic, crazy weather, infidelity, class struggle, nativism, fundamentalism, and pleasure. Leyden is a town not unlike the one where I live, where I raised my children, and where the majority of my friends reside. There is something about living in a small town that appeals to me as a writer. Here I have rewarding social access to a wide variety of people, rich and poor, young and old, which was something I wasn't able to accomplish when I lived in Manhattan. People in smaller towns tend not to be as self-protective as urban dwellers. In cities, the big fear is encroachment; in my town, the danger is isolation and loneliness. Like many writers, I am a bit of a voyeur, and knowing what is going on in the lives of a wide variety of people is exciting to me. When a stranger in the diner is yakking away on their cell phone, I find eavesdropping on this supposedly private conversation illuminating, even if it’s primarily about defrosting the lasagna. I want to know everyone’s secrets.
2. Would you talk about the title and its significance?
I believe we are all of us on earth connected and this unity is the river under the road, the unseen, generally unacknowledged life of the planet that involves us all, whether we want it to or not. In my own life and the lives I have observed, history—current events, environmental shifts, changes in demography—have played a significant but often unspoken role. Money, kids, romance, illness, aging—these are the things, and these are the things that make up our personal memories, but in the meanwhile the way we live is being influenced by everything from Chinese monetary policies to volcanic eruptions half a world away. My fantasy when I began writing River Under the Road was to have a kind of belly-band running beneath the text, giving reports of what was going on simultaneously all over the world while my characters lives were unfolding, just like you see on cable TV. But, alas, I was persuaded to abandon this idea. You'd think after 11 novels I'd be more stubborn, but I caved on this and I still feel drawn to my original idea, though I do accept the argument that it would have been difficult, especially for the book designer.
3. You write so well about marriage, its rages, its joys, its monotony—your 1995 novel Men in Black is one of my favorite novels that explores a faltering marriage, and here Thaddeus and his wife Grace struggle to keep things together. I heard someone explain her parents’ marriage’s longevity in this way: neither of them ever wanted a divorce at the same time. Thaddeus tries to be a good husband but is so often away; Grace is an artist who rightfully feels underappreciated and resents his success – I wasn’t sure what to make of her by the end of the novel. What would you say motivates her, as opposed to what motivates Thaddeus?
Grace, the child of a depressed mother and an absent, somewhat immoral father, is motivated by a desire to be seen as not only valuable but special. She feels the most unique thing about her is her ability to draw with great verisimilitude. That the art world she encounters has virtually no interest in that kind of art makes her furious—though she is insecure enough to suspect that the art world’s low opinion of her might be valid. When she decides to follow Thaddeus to New York, she feels they are both outsiders, hoping to be recognized as artists, which, in her youthful and Midwestern naiveté, she thinks of as life’s A List. Thaddeus is probably not as talented as the two of them think he is, but he is lucky and finds success, which has the effect of making Grace feel not only jealous but diminished. Everything that Thaddeus's success brings them—a house, household help, cars, travel—is a reminder to Grace that no one is buying her work.
4. I love this quote on p. 141: “They pondered the difference between success and money. Money gave you time enough to explore the limitations of money. And money reminded you that life is full of luck, both good and bad.” As a fiction writer, I find the idea of luck extremely interesting, but as a living and breathing human, it’s not exactly reassuring. Would you say that most of your novels address this question in one way or another?
I came of age during a relatively fluid time in America—unions were strong, incomes were rising for the working classes, and though social mobility was the exception rather than the rule, it still was not rare. This step toward egalitarianism was progress and most of us believe in progress, not only its desirability but its inevitability. However, as I settled into my life, my family, my career, I observed that all around me people were staying in the class into which they were born. I wanted to explore this idea and what better place to do it that Leyden, where it can be seen close-up. I think the spark to write this particular book was an incident that didn’t find its way into the book itself—being seated at a dinner party and the hostess calling in her cook who stood before the guests as they applauded her skills. I will not soon forget the look on her face.
5. You take on class differences so compellingly in RUtR; Thaddeus wants to be accepted by the Hudson Valley elite but because he and Grace are new money, they aren’t, not really. There are also several working class characters in Leyden who do the bidding, grudgingly or not, of the rich residents. This is a timely and quietly political book, and I’m curious about where you began, what was the initial spark for this novel. Was it something you observed personally, or a new story, or something else?
When Thaddeus hits the jackpot in my novel, he is not only rescued from genteel poverty but also from having to confront the fact that he is not really a novelist. When success barged into my life, I had already written two novels and had already developed my methods of working. Nevertheless, it was destabilizing. I had been working in almost total privacy and with my third novel getting so much attention I was afraid I would never regain the sense of solitude and the willingness to take risks that had been mine. This uneasiness lengthened the time between books, but there were other factors, as well--mainly the birth of my two children, and moving out of the city and into a fragile, temperamental house 100 miles north. But what terrific problems, yes? Too much attention, too much love, too much life! Someone ought to have told me these things can be fleeting, though I probably would not have listened. Which is to say, that gap between books was a fine time, and I wish I had savored every minute.
6. What are a few of the books you’ve returned to again and again over the years? Films that you think about often?
Books I return to: The Dog of the South , by Charles Portis, A Mother's Kisses , by Bruce Jay Friedman, Lolita, by VN. Movies: Vertigo, Vertigo, Vertigo.
Spencer is probably best known for his two National Book Award-nominated novels Endless Love and A Ship Made Of Paper and some of his other novels that I also highly recommend are Willing, Men in Black, Waking the Dead, and The Rich Man's Table.
1. Several of your novels, including River Under the Road, take place in Leyden, a small town in the Hudson Valley, about 100 miles from New York City. What is it about this town and its inhabitants that most galvanizes you as a fiction writer?
In the town I have named Leyden I have a setting that has everything that interests me as a novelist—animal life both wild and domestic, crazy weather, infidelity, class struggle, nativism, fundamentalism, and pleasure. Leyden is a town not unlike the one where I live, where I raised my children, and where the majority of my friends reside. There is something about living in a small town that appeals to me as a writer. Here I have rewarding social access to a wide variety of people, rich and poor, young and old, which was something I wasn't able to accomplish when I lived in Manhattan. People in smaller towns tend not to be as self-protective as urban dwellers. In cities, the big fear is encroachment; in my town, the danger is isolation and loneliness. Like many writers, I am a bit of a voyeur, and knowing what is going on in the lives of a wide variety of people is exciting to me. When a stranger in the diner is yakking away on their cell phone, I find eavesdropping on this supposedly private conversation illuminating, even if it’s primarily about defrosting the lasagna. I want to know everyone’s secrets.
2. Would you talk about the title and its significance?
I believe we are all of us on earth connected and this unity is the river under the road, the unseen, generally unacknowledged life of the planet that involves us all, whether we want it to or not. In my own life and the lives I have observed, history—current events, environmental shifts, changes in demography—have played a significant but often unspoken role. Money, kids, romance, illness, aging—these are the things, and these are the things that make up our personal memories, but in the meanwhile the way we live is being influenced by everything from Chinese monetary policies to volcanic eruptions half a world away. My fantasy when I began writing River Under the Road was to have a kind of belly-band running beneath the text, giving reports of what was going on simultaneously all over the world while my characters lives were unfolding, just like you see on cable TV. But, alas, I was persuaded to abandon this idea. You'd think after 11 novels I'd be more stubborn, but I caved on this and I still feel drawn to my original idea, though I do accept the argument that it would have been difficult, especially for the book designer.
3. You write so well about marriage, its rages, its joys, its monotony—your 1995 novel Men in Black is one of my favorite novels that explores a faltering marriage, and here Thaddeus and his wife Grace struggle to keep things together. I heard someone explain her parents’ marriage’s longevity in this way: neither of them ever wanted a divorce at the same time. Thaddeus tries to be a good husband but is so often away; Grace is an artist who rightfully feels underappreciated and resents his success – I wasn’t sure what to make of her by the end of the novel. What would you say motivates her, as opposed to what motivates Thaddeus?
Grace, the child of a depressed mother and an absent, somewhat immoral father, is motivated by a desire to be seen as not only valuable but special. She feels the most unique thing about her is her ability to draw with great verisimilitude. That the art world she encounters has virtually no interest in that kind of art makes her furious—though she is insecure enough to suspect that the art world’s low opinion of her might be valid. When she decides to follow Thaddeus to New York, she feels they are both outsiders, hoping to be recognized as artists, which, in her youthful and Midwestern naiveté, she thinks of as life’s A List. Thaddeus is probably not as talented as the two of them think he is, but he is lucky and finds success, which has the effect of making Grace feel not only jealous but diminished. Everything that Thaddeus's success brings them—a house, household help, cars, travel—is a reminder to Grace that no one is buying her work.
4. I love this quote on p. 141: “They pondered the difference between success and money. Money gave you time enough to explore the limitations of money. And money reminded you that life is full of luck, both good and bad.” As a fiction writer, I find the idea of luck extremely interesting, but as a living and breathing human, it’s not exactly reassuring. Would you say that most of your novels address this question in one way or another?
I came of age during a relatively fluid time in America—unions were strong, incomes were rising for the working classes, and though social mobility was the exception rather than the rule, it still was not rare. This step toward egalitarianism was progress and most of us believe in progress, not only its desirability but its inevitability. However, as I settled into my life, my family, my career, I observed that all around me people were staying in the class into which they were born. I wanted to explore this idea and what better place to do it that Leyden, where it can be seen close-up. I think the spark to write this particular book was an incident that didn’t find its way into the book itself—being seated at a dinner party and the hostess calling in her cook who stood before the guests as they applauded her skills. I will not soon forget the look on her face.
5. You take on class differences so compellingly in RUtR; Thaddeus wants to be accepted by the Hudson Valley elite but because he and Grace are new money, they aren’t, not really. There are also several working class characters in Leyden who do the bidding, grudgingly or not, of the rich residents. This is a timely and quietly political book, and I’m curious about where you began, what was the initial spark for this novel. Was it something you observed personally, or a new story, or something else?
When Thaddeus hits the jackpot in my novel, he is not only rescued from genteel poverty but also from having to confront the fact that he is not really a novelist. When success barged into my life, I had already written two novels and had already developed my methods of working. Nevertheless, it was destabilizing. I had been working in almost total privacy and with my third novel getting so much attention I was afraid I would never regain the sense of solitude and the willingness to take risks that had been mine. This uneasiness lengthened the time between books, but there were other factors, as well--mainly the birth of my two children, and moving out of the city and into a fragile, temperamental house 100 miles north. But what terrific problems, yes? Too much attention, too much love, too much life! Someone ought to have told me these things can be fleeting, though I probably would not have listened. Which is to say, that gap between books was a fine time, and I wish I had savored every minute.
6. What are a few of the books you’ve returned to again and again over the years? Films that you think about often?
Books I return to: The Dog of the South , by Charles Portis, A Mother's Kisses , by Bruce Jay Friedman, Lolita, by VN. Movies: Vertigo, Vertigo, Vertigo.
Published on August 10, 2017 17:13
July 7, 2017
Q and A with Rebecca Entel about her new novel FINGERPRINTS OF PREVIOUS OWNERS
1. Tell us a little about your novel.
Here’s the jacket copy:
At a Caribbean resort built atop a former slave plantation, Myrna works as a maid by day; by night she trespasses on the resort’s overgrown inland property, secretly excavating the plantation ruins the locals refuse to acknowledge. Myrna's mother has stopped speaking and her friends are focused on surviving the present, but Myrna is drawn to Cruffey Island's violent past. With the arrival of Mrs. Manion, a wealthy African-American, also comes new information about the history of the slave-owner’s estate and tensions finally erupt between the resort and the local island community. Suffused with the sun-drenched beauty of the Caribbean, Fingerprints of Previous Owners is a powerful novel of hope and recovery in the wake of devastating trauma. In her soulful and timely debut, Entel explores what it means to colonize and be colonized, to trespass and be trespassed upon, to be wounded and to heal.
2. You mentioned at a recent book event that you originally wrote half the novel from the POV of a white college girl from Wisconsin and half from Myrna's, a Bahamian woman, but eventually realized that the story needed to be told mostly through Myrna’s POV. How did you come too this decision?
I’d known for a while that Myrna’s portion of the book was stronger overall than the other narrator’s, but I’d started with that narrator and hadn’t thought about giving her up. I’d just been revising with an eye to strengthen that half of the book. The idea to let Myrna tell the whole story originally came from a conversation with my editor, and was supported by some other readers. It seemed impossible at first to make such a drastic revision – especially after so many years of writing – but within a few hours of tackling the opening of the book from Myrna’s point of view, I knew it was the right decision. And it’s been educational for me to recognize that even more than five years into a project, there might still be a totally new way to view it.
3. Related to the above - how did you settle on the structure of Fingerprints? You have short “bench story” sections in the voices many of the islanders your main character Myrna knows, along with chapters told in Myrna’s voice.
I’m a slow writer, and the structure took a while as well. When I first worked on the bench stories, they were grouped together in one chapter toward the end of the book. That didn’t quite work, though, since the chapter became really dense and threw too much at the reader late in the game, I think. Some of the material from those stories ended up integrated into the main narrative, and then I worked on choosing a few stories that could be scattered throughout the book. I changed my mind about which stories should go where too many times to count. I have some strange notes from when I was trying out different orders that almost look like Sudoku boards.
4. You’re a professor of Caribbean and African American literature and you’ve spent years studying these fields, and Fingerprints of Previous Owners is set on San Salvador where you’ve also taught classes in literature. What skills do you draw on to write fiction that might be different from when you write scholarly work?
These two kinds of writing are so different that I don’t even really think of them as the same act. But there are some similarities: whether I’m writing or analyzing literature, I’m thinking about small details, and the larger patterns they might add up to. In scholarly work, I’m trying to connect tiny moments in a text to larger ideas whereas in fiction I have to hold back and allow readers to piece things together and come to the larger ideas on their own. In fiction, I get to play with language as much as I’d like. And while clarity is the goal in scholarly work, in fiction sometimes I’m going for something else: subtlety, ambiguity.
5. The ravages and the weight of racism, imperialism, and slavery figure prominently in this novel - from where did the idea for Fingerprints of Previous Owners originate?
I was doing lots of research about slavery and imperialism in the Caribbean for the Caribbean literature class I was teaching, but my creative work always comes from small details, not big themes. I started taking notes for what I thought was a short story based on some things I saw during my first couple of trips to the island that struck me as just strange and puzzling: a beach where garbage washed up from all over the world, a tourist snorkeling in a pool yards away from the ocean, and the ruins of the plantations that were so overgrown we needed machetes to reach them (and in some cases couldn’t find what we searched for). I didn’t know what the book would ultimately be about, but those are the things that stayed with me, and as the story came together, those weights you mentioned were inextricable from the place I was describing and the characters’ lives.
6. Myrna and the other islanders have such engaging voices - are some of them based on people you met when you've been teaching on San Salvador?
All of the characters are purely fictional, but there were roles on the island that have struck me and influenced the characters I created. For example, my students got to meet with the person in charge of the landfill to hear about how garbage is handled on the island, and that became an important part of my story. There’s a shop owner in town who has generously spoken with me at length about her decades-old business and how some things have changed over time, so I made sure to create a character who ran a shop in her honor. In the end, though, I fictionalized the island, and the characters are all from my imagination.
7. What are you working on now, if you don’t mind sharing this?
I’m working on another novel, this one set in Cleveland, where I grew up. I’m still figuring out what it’s all about.
Rebecca Entel is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she teaches courses in creative writing, multicultural American literature, Caribbean literature, and the literature of social justice. Her short stories have appeared in such journals as Guernica and Joyland Magazine. Fingerprints of Previous Owners is her first novel.
Here’s the jacket copy:
At a Caribbean resort built atop a former slave plantation, Myrna works as a maid by day; by night she trespasses on the resort’s overgrown inland property, secretly excavating the plantation ruins the locals refuse to acknowledge. Myrna's mother has stopped speaking and her friends are focused on surviving the present, but Myrna is drawn to Cruffey Island's violent past. With the arrival of Mrs. Manion, a wealthy African-American, also comes new information about the history of the slave-owner’s estate and tensions finally erupt between the resort and the local island community. Suffused with the sun-drenched beauty of the Caribbean, Fingerprints of Previous Owners is a powerful novel of hope and recovery in the wake of devastating trauma. In her soulful and timely debut, Entel explores what it means to colonize and be colonized, to trespass and be trespassed upon, to be wounded and to heal.
2. You mentioned at a recent book event that you originally wrote half the novel from the POV of a white college girl from Wisconsin and half from Myrna's, a Bahamian woman, but eventually realized that the story needed to be told mostly through Myrna’s POV. How did you come too this decision?
I’d known for a while that Myrna’s portion of the book was stronger overall than the other narrator’s, but I’d started with that narrator and hadn’t thought about giving her up. I’d just been revising with an eye to strengthen that half of the book. The idea to let Myrna tell the whole story originally came from a conversation with my editor, and was supported by some other readers. It seemed impossible at first to make such a drastic revision – especially after so many years of writing – but within a few hours of tackling the opening of the book from Myrna’s point of view, I knew it was the right decision. And it’s been educational for me to recognize that even more than five years into a project, there might still be a totally new way to view it.
3. Related to the above - how did you settle on the structure of Fingerprints? You have short “bench story” sections in the voices many of the islanders your main character Myrna knows, along with chapters told in Myrna’s voice.
I’m a slow writer, and the structure took a while as well. When I first worked on the bench stories, they were grouped together in one chapter toward the end of the book. That didn’t quite work, though, since the chapter became really dense and threw too much at the reader late in the game, I think. Some of the material from those stories ended up integrated into the main narrative, and then I worked on choosing a few stories that could be scattered throughout the book. I changed my mind about which stories should go where too many times to count. I have some strange notes from when I was trying out different orders that almost look like Sudoku boards.
4. You’re a professor of Caribbean and African American literature and you’ve spent years studying these fields, and Fingerprints of Previous Owners is set on San Salvador where you’ve also taught classes in literature. What skills do you draw on to write fiction that might be different from when you write scholarly work?
These two kinds of writing are so different that I don’t even really think of them as the same act. But there are some similarities: whether I’m writing or analyzing literature, I’m thinking about small details, and the larger patterns they might add up to. In scholarly work, I’m trying to connect tiny moments in a text to larger ideas whereas in fiction I have to hold back and allow readers to piece things together and come to the larger ideas on their own. In fiction, I get to play with language as much as I’d like. And while clarity is the goal in scholarly work, in fiction sometimes I’m going for something else: subtlety, ambiguity.
5. The ravages and the weight of racism, imperialism, and slavery figure prominently in this novel - from where did the idea for Fingerprints of Previous Owners originate?
I was doing lots of research about slavery and imperialism in the Caribbean for the Caribbean literature class I was teaching, but my creative work always comes from small details, not big themes. I started taking notes for what I thought was a short story based on some things I saw during my first couple of trips to the island that struck me as just strange and puzzling: a beach where garbage washed up from all over the world, a tourist snorkeling in a pool yards away from the ocean, and the ruins of the plantations that were so overgrown we needed machetes to reach them (and in some cases couldn’t find what we searched for). I didn’t know what the book would ultimately be about, but those are the things that stayed with me, and as the story came together, those weights you mentioned were inextricable from the place I was describing and the characters’ lives.
6. Myrna and the other islanders have such engaging voices - are some of them based on people you met when you've been teaching on San Salvador?
All of the characters are purely fictional, but there were roles on the island that have struck me and influenced the characters I created. For example, my students got to meet with the person in charge of the landfill to hear about how garbage is handled on the island, and that became an important part of my story. There’s a shop owner in town who has generously spoken with me at length about her decades-old business and how some things have changed over time, so I made sure to create a character who ran a shop in her honor. In the end, though, I fictionalized the island, and the characters are all from my imagination.
7. What are you working on now, if you don’t mind sharing this?
I’m working on another novel, this one set in Cleveland, where I grew up. I’m still figuring out what it’s all about.
Rebecca Entel is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she teaches courses in creative writing, multicultural American literature, Caribbean literature, and the literature of social justice. Her short stories have appeared in such journals as Guernica and Joyland Magazine. Fingerprints of Previous Owners is her first novel.
Published on July 07, 2017 08:49
June 8, 2017
Q and A with Ada Calhoun about her new book WEDDING TOASTS I'LL NEVER GIVE
1. Tell us a little about Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give.
Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give is a memoir structured as seven “toasts” about marriage that I wouldn’t actually give at a wedding because they’re too much information about what it’s really like. I write, for instance, about how marriage can be boring, how too much or too little change can feel like a threat, how soul mates aren’t real, and how it’s still likely that at some point one of you may want other people.
2. Three of the chapters in this book were also published as New York Times Modern Love columns and were extremely popular with readers. Which one was the catalyst for this book's eventual writing and publication?
The second one, “The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give,” which I wrote while going to a lot of weddings while fighting with my husband, was the one that really took off and made my editor want me to do this book. My Modern Love from 2012, from which I just took a little bit for the book, was about how to navigate lust for other people while you’re married. And the one from a couple weeks back was an excerpt from the book called “To Stay Married, Embrace Change.”
3. You interviewed so many people about marriage while writing and researching this book. What was something that you surprised in one or more of these interviews?
So many of these adorable couples married 30, 40, 50 years talked about what they’d survived as a couple and the lists were harrowing. Many had almost divorced at various points. It put the lie to the fairytale idea that if it’s a good marriage, or a good match, you won’t still suffer along the way.
4. Did your feelings about marriage change at all as you wrote Wedding Toasts?
It made me feel more warmly about the institution. Here’s this thing that we’ve been doing as human beings for thousands of years. While specifics have changed — in biblical times, plural marriage was allowed, for instance; and just in the last century in this country the freedom to marry was extended to interracial and then to gay couples. I found myself marveling that marriage is still something that most people do at some point, that there has been this consistency over very different cultures and through millennia.
5. This book is both tremendously smart and entertaining. Is domesticity one of your favored topics as a writer? Your first book, St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street, for example, is much different topically from Wedding Toasts, but equally engrossing. What are some of the other topics you enjoy writing about?
Why, thank you! I get bored easily, so I like writing about a lot of different stuff. I was thinking about NYC a lot a few years ago and felt pulled to write St. Marks Is Dead about the street I grew up on. And then I felt sort of IN IT with my marriage and felt like I wanted to write about that. When it comes to writing, I pretty much just follow whims.
6. What are you working on now if you don't mind sharing a few details?
I’m working on a book tour and on a bunch of random freelance stories. Nothing I’ve been thinking about lately seems book-worthy, but I am open to suggestions!
Bio
Ada Calhoun is a journalist and book author based in New York City. You can learn more about her at www.adacalhoun.com
Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give is a memoir structured as seven “toasts” about marriage that I wouldn’t actually give at a wedding because they’re too much information about what it’s really like. I write, for instance, about how marriage can be boring, how too much or too little change can feel like a threat, how soul mates aren’t real, and how it’s still likely that at some point one of you may want other people.
2. Three of the chapters in this book were also published as New York Times Modern Love columns and were extremely popular with readers. Which one was the catalyst for this book's eventual writing and publication?
The second one, “The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give,” which I wrote while going to a lot of weddings while fighting with my husband, was the one that really took off and made my editor want me to do this book. My Modern Love from 2012, from which I just took a little bit for the book, was about how to navigate lust for other people while you’re married. And the one from a couple weeks back was an excerpt from the book called “To Stay Married, Embrace Change.”
3. You interviewed so many people about marriage while writing and researching this book. What was something that you surprised in one or more of these interviews?
So many of these adorable couples married 30, 40, 50 years talked about what they’d survived as a couple and the lists were harrowing. Many had almost divorced at various points. It put the lie to the fairytale idea that if it’s a good marriage, or a good match, you won’t still suffer along the way.
4. Did your feelings about marriage change at all as you wrote Wedding Toasts?
It made me feel more warmly about the institution. Here’s this thing that we’ve been doing as human beings for thousands of years. While specifics have changed — in biblical times, plural marriage was allowed, for instance; and just in the last century in this country the freedom to marry was extended to interracial and then to gay couples. I found myself marveling that marriage is still something that most people do at some point, that there has been this consistency over very different cultures and through millennia.
5. This book is both tremendously smart and entertaining. Is domesticity one of your favored topics as a writer? Your first book, St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street, for example, is much different topically from Wedding Toasts, but equally engrossing. What are some of the other topics you enjoy writing about?
Why, thank you! I get bored easily, so I like writing about a lot of different stuff. I was thinking about NYC a lot a few years ago and felt pulled to write St. Marks Is Dead about the street I grew up on. And then I felt sort of IN IT with my marriage and felt like I wanted to write about that. When it comes to writing, I pretty much just follow whims.
6. What are you working on now if you don't mind sharing a few details?
I’m working on a book tour and on a bunch of random freelance stories. Nothing I’ve been thinking about lately seems book-worthy, but I am open to suggestions!
Bio
Ada Calhoun is a journalist and book author based in New York City. You can learn more about her at www.adacalhoun.com
Published on June 08, 2017 10:54