Interview for Andrew's Book Club

Andrew’s Book Club (2009-2011) promoted short story collections, with a preference given to debut authors and authors early in their careers. When Naked Summer was published, a few of the authors whose titles I’d selected agreed to ask me a question about my own book. Now that the Andrew’s Book Club website is no more, I’ve archived that interview here.

Victoria Patterson: Naked Summer is your first book. What is your background as a writer?

I’m one of those weirdos who majored in creative writing. I took creative writing classes in high school. I have a B.A. and an M.F.A. in creative writing. I learned a lot from an army of writer-teacher mentors who were generous with their time. I became a reader, really, in those classes, or a more serious reader. The undergraduate program at Purdue was rigorous. I took craft and theory classes and workshops, and also served as the first undergraduate intern for the Sycamore Review. When I helped edit an undergraduate magazine, my first move was to beg grad students to submit their work, assuring them that I wouldn’t ask for First North American Rights—something I had to learn about in order to address their concerns—which is how a tiny photocopied zine we made for almost no money wound up publishing a poem that would later appear on the back cover of American Poetry Review. This also forged for me an identity: a writer who also edits the work of other writers.

Then I met a girl, a fiction writer. We’d both applied to graduate programs in creative writing. We thought, well, maybe we’ve got something big here, so we decided, after dating for about three months, to pack up and move across the country together. But which program? Ultimately, the powerhouse trio of writers who were then teaching at New Mexico State—Kevin McIlvoy, Antonya Nelson, Robert Boswell—won out, and it didn’t hurt that I also got to take a class with Don Kurtz, author of South of the Big Four, one of my favorite novels, who taught Spanish at NMSU and served on my thesis committee. I worked about 30-40 hours a week editing Puerto del Sol, too, which was its own learning experience.

Everything after that is just the slow crawl of forward movement.

Tracy Winn: Why stories? Where do they come from? (Dreams? Muse? The old grind?) What is it about short stories that suit you personally?

William Trevor talks about “the art of the glimpse” in short stories, which nicely sums up my attraction to them. I like stepping into characters’ lives for intense moments. I like shapeliness. Short stories, even more than novels, demand a concise understanding of the occasion for narrative. The short story is a tighter rope to walk. As a writer I’m drawn to balance and precision.

Sometimes my stories emerge from images, from bits of language, an interesting phrase I’ve overheard in public. Sometimes the title comes first. They’re usually not autobiographical, but when they are, I  mangle them into something new and hopefully not recognizable. And because I work on them for so long, I usually forget what I’ve taken for my fictive purposes, and from where. For me, stories come from the grind.

Midge Raymond: How did you decide which stories to include in Naked Summer? What’s been the most surprising part of the publishing process?

The most surprising part of the publishing process was how much say I had in how the book looks. Kevin Watson at Press 53 approved the cover designed by my wife, Victoria Barrett—the girl I moved across the country with. Victoria is an excellent fiction writer, and also the editor/publisher of Engine Books, so she knows her way around graphic design software. But, later in the process, we offered to typeset the book to alleviate some traffic jams in Press 53’s schedule. I don’t think many authors get to have this much control of the final product.

The stories I ended up with are all set in Indiana, mostly around Tippecanoe County, where I’m from. The book is, in its way, an outgrowth of my M.F.A. thesis. During the nine years between finishing the degree and having the book in hand, the manuscript evolved, but the core of the book is easily found in that thesis. I removed one story, which wasn’t set in Indiana, as the stories in Naked Summer are, and that became the chapbook I mentioned. I pulled another story after adapting it into a screenplay—when 14 pages became 114 pages, I realized it probably wasn’t really a short story. For a while, I thought it might become a novel, but now it’s a 100-plus page monster that I guess I have to call a novella, part of another longer project I’ll work on in the next few years. Finally, I ditched a third story from the the thesis after an agent said she didn’t like it. It just felt right. A story good enough to be published on its own might not fit into the overall design of a book.

Dylan Landis: Is this truly your first book, or are there others in the drawer? And I’d love to know a few short-story writers who really move you. And what you’ve learned from them, if you’re so inclined.

Naked Summer is my first book, but during its making, I also tried writing other books. Those other books have now been put aside while I unearth a novel I previously abandoned and buried. That said, I wish I had an actual drawer where I could put these works-in-progress. It’s not very sexy to say they’re on a hard drive.

Andre Dubus is one of my favorite writers. Raymond Carver, too, though unlike many of his fans, I prefer his post-Lish work. Stories like “Errand” and “Call If You Need Me” now matter more to me than his earliest stories, even if those great stories are what drew me in, all those years ago. Do I risk sounding like Mr. Obvious if I also include John Cheever, Alice Munro, and the rest? I studied with a story writer, Antonya Nelson, whose work moves me. She’s up there with William Trevor, as far as I’m concerned. And then so many story collections, such as Richard Ford’s Rock Springs, or Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love. In terms of story collections that aren’t themed or linked in any way, one of my favorites is The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff.

I also love going back to books by writers who’ve disappeared, sometimes intentionally, from the public’s view. Thom Jones, for instance, or Ralph Lombreglia. Edward P. Jones was off the radar for a long time, and we readers who loved Lost in the City wondered if he’d ever publish another book. One of my favorite writers closer to my age is Paul Yoon. There’s no shortage of excellence in the short story today. I’ve learned from all of them that the story is a vibrant form, and a necessary one, and that time spent writing or reading a short story is a good use of one’s hours. And that every story is a coming of age story, in its way, as well as a mystery.

Samuel Ligon: Which story in Naked Summer feels most complete to you? Which story are you most satisfied with? Which story was the most difficult to take to its final, finished state?

I suppose the title story was the most difficult, since it came to life as a 18-pager in the first person, and ended up at more than fifty pages in the third person a few years later, and then needed several more years of brewing to get where it’s at now. Handling so many scenes across several months of narrative time was something new, and helped me begin to transition to writing novels, too. It’s a different skill set, compared to a tiny story that takes place during a short span of time, such as “Sums and Subtractions,” which unfolds while the protagonist gets a haircut, or “The Hypnotist,” which takes place during a night of entertainment at the local high school. Several readers have told me that “All That Water” is their favorite story, for whatever that’s worth, and there’s satisfaction in that, for sure.

The story that still feels most complete is “Lost Lake,” the oldest story in the bunch. It was the first story I ever submitted. I sent it to five magazines the summer before I started grad school, and put my New Mexico address on the SASE, even though I hadn’t moved there yet. This meant there were five rejection letters waiting for me. Two were form rejections, but there was also a long handwritten note from The New Yorker, another long handwritten note from Story (R.I.P.), and a fairly typical typed letter from The Atlantic. This was encouraging, out of the gate, but ultimately frustrating, as the story never found a home, though I submitted it to a wide range of magazines and journals over the years. Esquire sent a long note about how great it was, perfect ending, all of that, and how they looked forward to my “literary career,” but it was still just another rejection. I let my ego interfere, too, assuming that since I’d come so close at places like The New Yorker or Esquire, small quarterlies from universities would surely want it. They didn’t. I ended up changing the title (barely) by changing the name of the golf course in the story, to help underscore some of the mystical, weirder elements at work.

It’s been a long road.

Laura van den Berg: What’s one short story you think everyone in the solar system should read, and why?

Right now, with intergalactic relations in the balance, I’ll kindly suggest that every being in the solar system should read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” which is about the essential need to really listen to one another, especially those you purport to love. The known universe needs more of that.