Interviews

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Lynn Emanuel was born in Mt. Kisco, New York, and raised in a working-class neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. Surrounded by an extended family of artists, and raised by a businesswoman mother, Emanuel distills her early experiences into a potent cocktail, rewarding diligent readers with unpredictable, meticulously crafted, hyper-aware poetry. In typical Emanuel style, a poem about her dead father, “Halfway Through the Book I’m Writing,” moves in a startling direction: “‘What gives?’ / I ask him. ‘I’m alone and dead,’ he says, / and I say, ‘Father, there’s nothing I can do about / all that. Get your mind off it. Help me with the poem / about the train.’ ‘I hate the poem about the train,’ / he says.”

Of Emanuel’s most recent book, Then, Suddenly—, Gerald Stern says, “There is some Eliot here, some Stein. Emanuel carries self-consciousness to the shrieking edge—and almost falls in. Well, she does fall in. She is a master of the negative, but she doesn’t sigh in boredom; she yells in pain. Her vision is original; so is her language.”

In addition to Then, Suddenly—, Emanuel is the author of two other collections of poetry: Hotel Fiesta and The Dig. Her work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Oxford Book of American Poetry, among other anthologies. Her honors include the National Poetry Series Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets for Then, Suddenly—.

Emanuel earned an MA from City College and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Vermont College Creative Writing Program. She currently directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh. We met in her New York City hotel room during the rush of the Association of Writing Programs 2008 conference, where we discussed comic strips, “breaking up” with Italo Calvino, and the culture of getting by in America.

SHIRA RICHMAN

Could you take us on the adventure of writing a poem, any poem you can think of, from its inception to how it grew, shrank, and found its own skin?

LYNN EMANUEL

It’s often a long, rather uncomfortable process for me. Right now, I’m getting another book together, and as I was gathering my work, I found a poem I had published in long-line couplets. I also found an earlier, longer draft, and I thought, Oh no, this is a much better version. Which I often think—that I remove too much material. So I went back and put the more substantial, longer version into the manuscript, and I brought it with me to New York, thinking I could read some new work. Of course, I looked at the draft I brought and thought, God, this is awfully wordy and long. The cliché about poems not being finished, just being abandoned, is particularly true for me. I never feel that a poem actually does reach the right form; it just reaches the form where I cannot bear any longer to change it.

Often it’s a process of scraping a lot of material away. I never write short poems. Never. The one short poem that Poetry published started out being much longer. I showed it to a friend and she crossed out everything but the last eight lines and that was it. I sent it to Poetry with a group of other things and that was the one they took.

I’m someone who carves things out of a larger block and then I feel the discomfort of having done that. Maybe I cleaned it up too much. Or maybe I’ve taken too much out. Or maybe I’ve diminished things.

REBECCA MORTON

Are you comfortable carving out a small piece of something longer?

EMANUEL

Well, it worked that time because I was a) so pressed for time, b) so fed up with that particular draft, and c) when I looked at what my friend did, I said, “Oh, that’s brilliant!” That was an extreme example. I feel both comfortable and uncomfortable writing that way.

The poet Bill Matthews was a friend of mine, and I remember him saying at one point, “The trouble is that it never gets any easier.” I think that may be especially true of poetry. The longer I write, the more difficult I’m finding it. Each book is different. I arrive at a moment when I have a certain number of pages and think, Okay, how do I put this together? I should know this, I think, I’ve done this. But each book presents its own problems.

One of the troubles is that as you get older, the expectation you have of yourself—that you know how this is going to work and you know how to do it—is actually something you have to battle against. When you’re younger, it’s all sort of scary, but you realize your book is going to be kind of a provisional form: You’re not going to achieve nirvana when you put this book together. You know you have other books down the road and you’ll get it right then. By the time you get to your fourth book, you think, Oh no, it’s never going to be… right. It’s always going to be like starting from the beginning. And you feel resentful. I do. I’m fifty-eight. I don’t like not knowing.

After my first book, what interested me were the ways in which the form of the book itself could be expressive. If I were a fiction writer, I would write novels. Never short stories. Giacometti said at the end of his life, “The only thing I care about is the feeling that I have when I’m working.” Which is a marvelous and unnerving thing to say. It’s wonderful, but it’s also like, And that’s it. I don’t feel I’m a great artist; I don’t feel inspired. That feeling while working was all he cared about. All I seem to care about these days is the larger unit of the book itself, the drama of turning a page, how I’m going to feel at the end, the unfolding of ideas and, often, narrative. I’m less and less interested in the work of perfecting a single poem. And though I work like a dog on that, in an odd way it doesn’t interest me. What interests me is the joining of the parts into something else. But I’m exhausted by it. Enough already; I want to be Steve Dunn.

The story I tell about Steve Dunn is that I was at a writers’ colony—I think it was MacDowell—and as I was walking out of my little cabin in the woods one morning, he was on his way with suitcases, and I said, “Oh, you’re leaving today?” He said he was, and I asked what he was doing until his ride arrived. He said, “Well, I have an hour left and my book is due at my publisher, so I’m going to assemble the manuscript.” And I realized that if you are Steve Dunn you can do that. It’s something I envy but can’t seem to do.

RICHMAN

So you’re not working on individual poems, you’re working on a group?

EMANUEL

It seems that I am. Always. Even when I pretend I’m not. My poems aren’t interesting to me until they’re part of a larger form of articulation. I’m interested in contradiction. I’m interested in saying something and then unsaying it. Or saying something and then inventing a voice that says, “No, that’s not at all the case.” If you’re interested in binaries and contradictions and conflicted versions of yourself and anything else, then maybe you have to be interested in the larger unit.

RICHMAN

I know you described Then, Suddenly— as a group of rebellions, such as the characters against the author and the author against convention. How much do you see the writing of that book as a rebellion against yourself and your previous work?

EMANUEL

Honestly, at the time I was writing it, I didn’t see it as being very different from my earlier poems. It was only in retrospect that I became aware that it was. I wish I could say, “Oh, yes, I was rebelling against my earlier work or I was re-seeing it or undoing it.” At the time, though, I didn’t realize that.

My father’s death came in the middle of writing that book, which was so enormous an event it swept away everything else. I remember Molly Peacock saying there was a time in her life when she was so sad and spiritually miserable that the only thing she could do in a poem was to get from one syllable to the next. And that’s how she became a formalist, which I always thought was a magnificent account of why it is that one might make a certain kind of choice in one’s writing. I think in an odd way that Then, Suddenly— was like that for me. I was just drenched in sorrow. The book had started as an investigation of my interest in movies and film, and the difference between sitting down and experiencing something on a page and sitting down and being moved by a film. That was going to be the subject of my book.

And then my father died. Then the issue of what it meant to be moved and be moving became an incredible heartache. I wish I could say that, at the time, I understood that this book was different from my others, but I didn’t. I just tried to get from one syllable to the next. I just tried to deal with grief and finish a book. I didn’t know how different it was until afterward.

MORTON

Do you think your concept of the book you are currently writing is different now than it will be after it’s done?

EMANUEL

There are writers who are much more articulate about what they are doing at the time they are doing it, and I seem to be someone who needs to undergo a generous period of self-delusion and think I’m doing X when all the time I’m doing Y. So I don’t really know.

I’ve written a series of poems in the voice of a dog, and I’ve invented an idiom for this dog. It talks a little like a cartoon. I began the poems when I was teaching for one semester at the University of Alabama. I felt I was absolutely outside of the English language, because all around me it was being spoken in a way that made me feel like a Yankee foreigner. Also, it felt like daily speech was much more engaged in the sort of—I don’t know—eloquence and figurative possibility. Everyday speech seemed to accommodate figurative language in a way that, when I was teaching my students or getting groceries in Pittsburgh, didn’t happen. So I felt clumsy and awkward; every time I opened my mouth, I was The Other.

This dog started to talk to me and it was a companion in clumsiness and awkwardness. The dog also became a figure for a kind of class—an underdog—and a whole landscape grew up around this character, a world of diminishment and poverty. So I think that’s going to be part of the book, but I don’t know quite how.

RICHMAN

It seems you’re often interested in the relationship between language and class. What are the origins of that interest?

EMANUEL

I always felt that The Dig was really about class and work and impoverishment and how those things impinge on women. That continues to be something I’m interested in. It comes from my own background. When I was growing up, there was a time when my mother and I lived on our own; we had few resources and little money. That kind of hardship is very very moving to me—to live in this culture just barely above the line that says you are really poor. Just kind of making it moment to moment. A lot of people in America live that way, and I think they always have.

Frankly, it’s one of the things I love about Gwendolyn Brooks’ poems. They inhabit that landscape so fully; they’re about the culture of getting by, especially her early work. I think that’s what this dog is all about. I was reading the New York Times this morning and one of the articles was about the dogs they rescued from Michael Vick. It’s sort of unreal, the cruelty that was visited upon these animals. But it’s not about the Michael Vicks. It’s about a culture in which an animal, domesticated so that it is deeply part of our lives, has such cruelty visited upon it. Sometimes a dog is not just a dog. Sometimes it is a symbol for how we mete out cruelty to each other and about the abuse of things that don’t have power. Women, dogs, poor people.

It was incredible to me when, during a discussion regarding ways to recharge the economy, someone in Congress said, “Well, let’s give people more food stamps,” and someone else said, “Oh, no, let’s not do it that way. Let’s do it another way.” I thought, How can it be that someone can say, “Let’s give people who need food more food or a way to buy more food,” and then someone else says, “No, let’s not do that,” and that is considered merely part of daily conversation? It flabbergasted me, that kind of cruelty. In some way, this whole thing about the dog is part of that, although the backstory will never make it into the book.

MORTON

In an interview a few years back, you said that one of the reasons you’re drawn to film noir is for its obsessiveness, the same image coming up over and over again. What are your current literary obsessions?

EMANUEL

Comic strips. It’s weird. My imagination has to be obsessively faithful to some muse. First, it was the muse of film noir; now, it’s the muse of comic strips. I’m fascinated with how, in a way, each panel in the strip is like a single poem, maybe a sonnet. The panel is a little box and an image and some language; it’s an extremely tight, circumscribed form.

I’m particularly interested in one by George Herriman, called Krazy Kat, that lasted from the twenties into the forties or fifties. There were three main characters: a cat and a mouse and a policeman. Herriman listened to immigrant language, to the language of people who were learning English, so the language of the strip was saturated with this fabulous nontraditional English. The language is itself a kind of character and landscape, and that really interests me.

That’s my current obsession. Can I get away with this? Can I create a sort of comic strip character, and do I need graphics? How do I wed a graphic element to the text?

MORTON

The image of the dress comes up frequently in your work. What does the dress mean to you?

EMANUEL

Clothes have their own life. They are symbols and icons, and people don them. They put them on, and they are read in a certain way. R-e-d and r-e-a-d. I think that one privilege of writing out of a noir aesthetic is that icons of clothing in film noir are very clear. There’s the bad girl and the good girl and the gangster. There’s a way the gangster dresses and a way the good guy dresses, and what kind of hats he wears, and the way the police dress. There are only about four or five possibilities. The palette is very limited.

Also, it seems to me an underutilized possibility. Why aren’t more people writing about clothes? Why can’t a hat or a dress be a symbol like a rose? Why are pieces of clothing a less legitimate series of symbols than other things? Why is clothing less legitimate than trees? In India, walking down the street, you can read people’s castes from their clothing, and I think that’s also true in the U.S. I don’t think clothing is any less legitimate than the natural world as a source for metaphor.

The same is true of food. Sometimes even I’m surprised by how much I write about food. It fascinates me. And I think that these subjects—food and clothing—are seen as traditionally feminine. You can be a man and write movingly about trees and water and flowers because Wordsworth did—although he stole a lot of it from his sister—but writing about clothing is typically seen as a product of the feminine imagination or of the “feminized man.” I think that’s one reason food and clothing don’t have legitimacy as a source for images.

RICHMAN

You grew up surrounded by all kinds of artists: dancers, sculptors, choreographers, and painters. Did you feel there were other possibilities for your life, or did you feel you had to choose among artistic pursuits?

EMANUEL

I had about as much choice as someone who comes from a family of lawyers and has to go into law. To some degree, it was not a choice. It was so all around me that another way of being in the world didn’t seem an option, even though my mother was a businesswoman. But she was a real pioneer. She was singular. There were not a lot of women who were serious businesswomen in the 1950s. So, that felt like an anomaly. It was an anomaly.

RICHMAN

Do you wish you’d had a choice? What else might you have done?

EMANUEL

Now I wish I had. [Laughs.] I don’t know what I would’ve done. The older I get, the more I feel that now I want to do something that’s more directly helpful to people. I would like to be an advocate for children in courts. The older I get, the more I think about how much more time I have. It’s great to write poetry, but I want something that’s more direct.

MORTON

Your last book, Then, Suddenly—, is so funny. Do you see risks in incorporating humor into your work, or do you fear that incorporating humor will cause people to take you less seriously?

EMANUEL

I have never had that fear. I always feel that my humor emerges out of rage and sorrow. There are different ways of being funny in books and different forms of humor. When you are part of a disadvantaged group, you often use humor as a way of getting back at the dominant culture.

I have never felt that I would not be taken seriously because of humor. I know this is something people talk about and a concern that writers have. Maybe I should be concerned about that. But I’ve always felt that in any book I’ve written there’s been enough gravity that the reader doesn’t just yuk it up all the way through. In Then, Suddenly—, my dead father’s voice comes in and says, “God, I hate this poem,” or, in another poem, “Who are you dating?” Maybe I’m wrong about this, but if you’ve experienced the death of someone close to you, that kind of thing is both extremely funny and just horribly hurtful. People die, but they don’t go away. They are still there and they visit you. So when the father in “Halfway Through the Book I’m Writing,” says “I’m alone and dead,” I find that a horrible moment that sort of balances the humor.

RICHMAN

Are there influences in your life that helped you hone your sense of humor? People who you saw or studied or learned from, or ways in which you were forced to use humor?

EMANUEL

I don’t think so, but growing up, I did see a lot of people in my family use humor as a way of keeping themselves afloat. Humor is like the ability to sing well. It’s a kind of pleasure you can provide for yourself that doesn’t depend on anything or anyone. You are able to provide your own joy and you don’t need anybody else to do it. Since I couldn’t sing, I think humor became that.

And I will say, now as I think about it—I can’t remember how old I was—maybe I was in my middle twenties when I met William Matthews at Bread Loaf. He was the most extraordinary talker. You would want to sit for hours and listen to him. He was so eloquent and funny, and his humor was often extremely cutting. I remember once when we were in New York, I was saying something about the influence of a well-known poet and Bill said, “Oh, yes, So-and-So likes everything from M to N.” It was perfect. He was absolutely right. That was the other thing about Bill’s humor, it was not only wonderful, but it was surgical. And after that, I could never feel bad again about So-and-So, because I would look at him and think, Oh, yeah, he likes everything from M to N. Bill inspired me. I learned from him that humor could be complicated.

RICHMAN

Once, an interviewer asked you, “So did you quit reading Italo Calvino?” and you answered, “Yes, it was like quitting smoking.” Why?

EMANUEL

Because, at a certain point, reading Calvino was a kind of addiction. I felt, Why should I write? Here’s someone who’s written every book that I would ever want to write. I must be him. I am totally unhappy in the world unless I can be reincarnated as Calvino.

So I had to stop reading him because there was no reason to be myself. In order to just get a book written, I had to stop reading him because he was one of those authors who—for me—seems perfect. Then, luckily, I discovered that he wasn’t perfect. I think there’s a lack of tragic vision in Calvino. It was marvelous when I found that out. Aha! Here’s your fatal flaw! You bastard, you had me in your clutches all these years!

All of my homages are arguments with poets. Walt Whitman, get out of here! Who can be an American poet? Nobody can be an American poet—you’ve already been every poet in the world. Every permutation of American poetry that we could possibly imagine, you’ve already done it. You’ve ruined us.

And Gertrude Stein. I mean, I love Gertrude Stein. Sometimes, I think there were these writers who were beamed down to us from more advanced civilizations and I think Stein may have been one of them—I’m sure Emily Dickinson was one of them—but it’s also true that Stein is sometimes just a typewriter. I don’t think it’s interesting to be someone who just worships Gertrude Stein, so I had to have an argument.

I had to have an argument with Calvino, which meant at a certain point I just had to say, “Okay, I’m turning you off. I’m changing the channel. No more Calvino. We’re breaking up.”

Actually, I hope it works. I’m writing an homage now to Baudelaire, and, by the way, he is the poet of clothing. And whenever I wonder, Why do I think it’s legitimate to write about women’s dresses? I read him. Of course, he was French and I’m not, but nevertheless—I absolutely have to break up with him now. He doesn’t know it, but… [Laughs.]

MORTON

What elements of your work are influenced by Stein?

EMANUEL

Here’s the thing: stylistically, aside from that one homage, “inside Gertrude Stein,” I don’t think there’s much influence. It’s not talked about often enough that one can have a lot of influences as a poet that don’t show up stylistically. I was influenced by the idea of her. I was influenced by the way she makes nouns and verbs and syntaxes into characters—she was beyond the pale.

I taught a course on the avant-garde with a colleague of mine, and nobody we read was as radical as she. So I love the idea of her and I love some of her writing—I love the way she critiques syntax, critiques the sentence—but I don’t feel therefore obliged to deracinate sentences because of Gertrude Stein. There are poets who do feel that way, and I admire that, but I seem to be able to be completely and comfortably contrarian in my writing. It doesn’t bother me. I can use conventional syntax and love Gertrude Stein, love her critique of conventional syntax, believe that she’s absolutely right—and still use conventional syntax. I would have no trouble being a collaborator during a war, I’m afraid. It wouldn’t occur to me that I couldn’t play both sides. Or I could easily be a double agent, the spy who spies both ways.

RICHMAN

That’s partly what relates you to Gertrude Stein, because I think of that as a sort of Cubism. And one of the things in Then, Suddenly— that’s so interesting is that, as a reader, you can go from poem to poem and never know what your role is going to be. It seems as though you’re examining the roles of reader, writer, speaker, and character from all these different angles and points of view.

EMANUEL

That’s exactly what it was. [Laughs.] I knew that! That’s wonderful. Perhaps you’re right, although I don’t think I understood it until you said it. I think you’re right. You don’t feel you have to remain faithful to a certain point of view, nor do you have to resolve the contradictions, nor do you have to, at the end, think, Well, okay, here, we’ve arrived here. I felt it was enough to simply present this reader, that reader, this speaker, that speaker, this author, that author, and that was the composition. That’s exactly the reason I’m in love with Stein.

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Andre Dubus’s fiction dives into the underbelly and wrestles with copies we often turn away from: crime, poverty, infidelity, violence, merciless bullying, and pathetic sex. His lush layers sensory detail ground the reader in the smallest moments of his characters’ lives and their often unresolved conflicts. We tumble along with them, with rarely a redemptive branch to grab on to. From his first book of gritty stories, to his novels, memoir, and most recent collection of novellas, Dubus looks unflinchingly at the inner lives of the common man and woman: bartenders and recovering alcoholics, construction workers and criminals, bank tellers and strippers, wives and husbands. Even though these characters are sometimes hard to watch, there is a beauty to their tragic stories that keeps us mesmerized. They are bruised and real, and even if we want to turn away, we cannot, because we recognize their desperation in ourselves.

Dubus grew up with his three siblings and single mother in the tough, economically depressed mill towns along the Merrimack River in Massachusetts. He chronicles his childhood—his despair, his estranged relationship with his well-known father, his turn to violence and eventually writing—in his 2011 memoir, Townie. Over the years he has held many jobs that still allowed him to write: bartender, carpenter, house cleaner, halfway-house counselor, and teacher, all of which gave him a deep well of vivid detail to draw from for his fiction.

Dubus is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and Townie. His most recent book, Dirty Love, published in the fall of 2013 , was a New York Times Notable Book selection, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a 2013 Notable Fiction choice from The Washington Post, and a Kirkus Starred Best Book of 2013. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a 2012 recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Known for his gregarious and generous personality, Dubus’s candor and humor strike a sharp contrast to his dark prose. A beloved professor and devoted father and husband, Dubus fills his days with family, teaching, writing, and exercise, but as a self-proclaimed Luddite, he rarely depends on technology to help him out. We met in the Marriott in Boston in the midst of a snowstorm, out of which Dubus had to dig his car to drive to us from his home in the town of Newbury port. Because the weather delayed him, he continued to update us by phone , but never by text. To ensure the interview would be captured, we put many pieces of technology in front of him, a digital voice recorder, two smartphones, and even an old-school cassette tape recorder purchased from Radio Shack in the late 1970s. Dubus is on the record proclaiming his fierce vehemence against these new technologies. We began by asking him about the role of technology in his life and in the life of the writer.

ELIZABETH KEMPER FRENCH

We were talking about technology a few minutes ago, and I’m wondering what role it plays in your life and your writing.

ANDRE DUBUS III

None. I’m not getting on the digital train. I don’t have one of those (a smartphone) and never will. But I’m an asshole, because we’ll be at a bar, and I’ll say, “Come on, buddy. You’re terrible to own one of those, but while you have it, what’s the score of the game?”

I don’t like modern life—with these gadgets. I know there are advantages to them, and what writer doesn’t like the research capability of the internet? I remember I was writing a novel and wanted to know what gasoline cost in East Texas in 1941. I had to call the Boston Public Library long distance from Newbury port. A nice old lady answered the phone. “Just a minute, dear,” and she goes off to the stacks. Ten minutes later—long distance, waiting—”I’ll have to call you back.” Four hours later, I get the information. “It was seventeen cents, dear.” And now, in your underwear, within a quarter second, you can get that information. I don’t like how we’re all staring at screens. I cannot cell you how many times I will look up at a reading—and you know what it’s like, when you’re reading your work, it’s like you’ re opening your soul; it just feels so vulnerable—and someone in the audience is looking down at a screen. It’s like you’re trying to kiss someone, and they’re watching TV I think it’s changing us. Every night, everyone in my house is on a screen. Sometimes, it’s legitimate. My wife has a dance business, doing work. But she didn’t have to do that work before she had the computer; work only happened during work hours. My daughter has the iPhone glued—sewn—into her hand, and she texts a thousand times a minute. And my sons are on the internet doing all they do. So it’s a philosophical turning-away-from, and a temperamental turning-away-from. The older I get, the more simplicity I want. I don’t think these things have helped us. I think they’ve made us little rats, made us pay attention to little, stupid shit. I see this ad, and all these quick cuts, and the logo for the new gadget is, “Always connected.” But I want to be disconnected. I want nothing to do with being connected. I want to call when I want to call. And I’m not going to call.

FRENCH

What do you chink of the personas people create of themselves online? Especially on social media sites like Facebook?

DUBUS

I find that part poignant—that people need to show who they were before they’re dead. And I think they have every right to pick and choose how they’re going to promote that or express that. I’ll never do it. My publisher made me get a Facebook page a few days ago, but I’ll never go on it. I said, “Put this letter on there,” and I wrote: “Dear readers, I’m not a fan of this whole digital world, but I’m a fan of human beings, and so this is here for you to know where I might be, and if you want to come meet me in person, I would love to see you in the flesh-and­-blood, eye-to-eye way. But that’s it. I’ll never be on chis again. Sincerely, whatever.” My wife’s got a Facebook page, which she doesn’t have time for, and I’ll look at the people on it, because how can you be a writer and not investigate a little bit? I’ll look and I’ll see that most of my friends who are in their fifties, for whom a family never happened—they fell through the cracks as wives and husbands. They’re going to die without having kids. And my heart goes out to these people, because my life began when I had kids. I think, They’re all alone. Why not reach out to people you haven’t seen for years? Why not? I’m not going to do it, but I’m not going to judge it. So, yes, I am a Luddite. I recently got a contract on the email that said just cut and paste and send it back this way. I wrote back saying, “I don’t know how to cut and paste.”

JOSEPH SALVATORE

Many emerging writers today are told by their publisher to promote their work through social media. The AWP conference is a viral place for mostly unknown writers to gather and network. Can you talk about the career versus the work?

DUBUS

I’m not criticizing. I know a lot of publishers are in peril financially, and so they’ve pushed this task onto us because they’ve laid off their publicists, and they’re trying to cut corners. I have to say, for me, this whole career consciousness is a kind of poison.

I think it’s a publisher’ s job to do all this shit, so I resist it, and I think we have every right to say, “That’s your job. You’re taking fifteen percent of every book, so earn it! I’m writing another one.” I really feel that way. But let me take that back, too; there’s a caveat to that. I’ve been fortunate enough to get some nice advances for the last few books, and so I’ll do a sixty-city fucking tour even though a book tour is a recipe for self-loathing. I’m very fortunate that I’m in the literary Boston community, because I’ve got a lot of good writer friends now, and while I didn’t always hang out with writers, I have a good chunk of them now, and they’re fun to hang out with. But I try to avoid any activity that makes me career conscious, because I am as susceptible to it as anyone. I didn’t want to be a writer to be a writer. I just like writing.

You read Townie, so you know I came to writing basically to save my life, and I was surprised it was in me, but it’s in a lot of us; there are six or seven writers in my clan. One of the benefits of being my dad’s son is I quickly realized no one was going to give me any positive attention whatsoever. The world was not only going to ignore me—it was going to kind of go after me.

I thought, I’ll just do it for me—no, not for me—for the characters who are coming. I’ll just show up every day. A day writing badly, or mediocrely, is a hundred times better than a day where we don’t get to the desk at all. I never lose sight of that fact that it’s a wonderful gift from the Divine, the Mysteries, whatever these things are around us, that I found early on something that, when I do it daily, makes me feel magnanimous toward humanity, keeps me curious, keeps me alive, and it’s been a wonderful happy accident that I actually had a career happen. Because that was never the plan. Early on, I couldn’t afford an office. There was no office at Emerson College. I was driving one day, thinking, Wow, when the radio’s off, this car ‘is pretty quiet. So I started to write in my car. I wrote all of House Of Sand and Fog over four years in my car. It was 5:30 in the morning—if it’s a carpentry day, I’m in my work clothes; if it’s a teaching day, I’m in my teaching clothes. I would get my coffee, go to the graveyard, pull up next to a grave. I’d open my composition notebook, sharpen my pencil with a utility knife, and I’d feel like sleeping. If it’s winter, I’ve got the car running with the heat on. If it’s summer, the windows are down and I’m wearing bug spray. I read a paragraph: “Ah, it sucks. Fuck.” Cross it out. Write two lines. Stare at them. Write three or four more lines. Write a paragraph. Ooh! Something’s starting to happen. Ah, fuck, time for work! And have to put it aside. But four years later, I had a book.

FRENCH

So did it take the full four years to write House Of Sand and Fog?

DUBUS

It took three years in the graveyard. At the end of that, I had twenty­ two notebooks with a beginning, middle, and end, and then I had to type it. I spent a year typing and revising. Then I sent it out. It went to twenty-four, twenty-five publishers over two years, which is normal. People don’t realize this. My first three books went to over a hundred publishers. Seven years of no’s to get those three yes’s. I also had the model of watching my father; his life never changed at all, whenever he had a book out. He also had a very small publisher. He would get some nice reviews, but he never made much money.I’m grateful for the material success I’ve had, but it’s been a happy accident.

FRENCH

I’m curious about writing in longhand. House of Sand and Fog was in different viewpoints. Did you find, over the course of three years, that it was difficult to find where you were? If you were in Kathy’s viewpoint, was it difficult to go back and find where the Colonel was? How did you manage that kind of multiple viewpoint, especially on paper?

DUBUS

Well, it wasn’t so much the paper as the lack of time I had to write. I just did a talk with Daniel Woodrell—Winter’s Bone—and before every writing day, he reads the entire manuscript before he writes the next sentence. If you’ve got two hundred pages—that’s four hours of reading—before writing the next sentence. So everyone’s got their own way. For me, and this may have helped, I knew I had thirty-one minutes, maybe, in the car before I had go to the highway to hit the job site or the classroom. I would reread enough to get back into character, and with the notebooks, it’s crossed-out lines and arrows and numbers. But here’s what I love about writing longhand: I built a soundproof cave in my basement, like a jail cell, five feet wide, six feet rail, eleven feet long. It’s got a little port window I cover with a blanket, a little desk, and a blank wall—and I’ll put on my headphones and I’ll play music and I’ll type the previous day’s longhand into the thing, and then I’ll turn off the music and read over the typed stuff, making revisions, and then I’ll keep writing longhand. I need the physical intimacy of flesh, blood, bone, wood, paper. It helps me enter the character.

SALVATORE

So you don ‘t listen to music when you’re doing fresh composition?

DUBUS

No. I have to have complete silence. I put headphones on that I used to use for my table-saw work. I can hear jackhammers or squirrels, but I can’t hear human voices.

FRENCH

Do you think it slows you down, in a way that’s helpful, to write longhand?

DUBUS

Writing longhand does slow you down. There’s a great line from Goethe: “Do not hurry. Do not rest.” Some people say, ” I need the computer, because my ideas are so fast.” I say, “Ideas? I don’t trust ideas. Ideas are just ideas.” I trust the other stuff. I love that line from Flannery O’Connor, from Mystery and Manners: “There’s a certain grain of stupidity the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and that’s the quality of having to stare.”

What I love about longhand is that when you look at that screen on the machine, every thing’s so fucking perfect, the margins, everything. It’s like having a partner you think you love—she’s so beautiful—but there’s really nothing going on between you. He’s so handsome and nice, but there’s just nothing happening. So every thing’s sexy, but I’m dead inside. The handwritten manuscript is homely; it’s ugly. It’s full of crossed-out words, X’s and numbers—read this first, then this and this, then arrow back four pages. It’s a messy pain in the ass, and when that starts to read well, you think, Well, there might be something happening here. So I would sometimes read twenty pages of mess, maybe five pages typed, and then I’d write in thirty-one minutes three sentences, and then I’d start the car and go. I like how it slows me down.

FRENCH

In your class at Emerson, you talked about the process of discovery when you’re writing a first draft, trying to capture what’s happening as truthfully as possible. Later, you’ve got a beginning, middle, and end, and you know it’s not there yet, but you have a sense of what happens, a sense of the conflict in the character you might not have realized at first. The characters slowly reveal themselves to you. So when you go back to revise, do you fear that you’re imposing something on the characters now that you’re more conscious of the work?

DUBUS

I love this Richard Bausch line: “If you think you’re thinking when you’re writing, think again. You’re much closer to the dreaming side when you’re writing, so just dream, dream, dream it through. Then when you’re done, try to look at what you’ve dreamed like a doctor looks at an X-ray, and cry to be terribly smart about it.” He’s talking about revision. I’ve stolen Janet Burroway’s distinction of story versus plot, and I use it in classes all the time, because I think it’s helpful, the way she elegantly lays it out: Story is a causal sequence of events, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. You have to give yourself permission to write through seventy pages of brush, where you know you’re kind of off the trail, and you’ve lost the scent, but you’ve got to write it to find your way back. You may not keep all that you’re writing about his history in dental school, but you’ve got to know who this dentist is, who’s married to your main character. Even though a little voice in your head says, “Ah, this is fucking really slow. This is such a—so what?” But you’ve got to find it. So what is plot? Plot, Burroway says, is how we arrange that causal sequence of events in order to highlight emotion, dramatic tension, theme, aesthetic, to make it more beautiful, to make it more fully itself. So go back to Bausch. He ‘s talking about that X-ray on the wall. Even then, he says, ”Try to be terribly smart about it.” I think he’s talking about plotting. And even then, it’s not a contrivance. Plotting is much a dream-like state; it’s more rational, analytical, and logical than dreaming, but it shouldn’t be too much that way. When it gets too much that way, that’s when you’re assuming, Oh, she’s a recovering alcoholic. I have to keep remembering that. But then I remind myself: Wait a minute. These are real people. I don’t think they’re just creations of writers. I think, when you’re writing well, you’re finding them in another dimension; it’s an act of spiritual excavation.

What distinguishes a good work from a great one, despite all the aspects of craft and all the skills you bring to it, is genuine curiosity. I’m speaking for myself. You teach what you need to learn. My worst writing has been when I have not been curious enough about the material. My best writing has been when I have been totally curious. He said this, but is it all that? She says this, but is this all she thinks about what she said? Is this all she feels about what she thinks? And is that all he said when she said what she thought, after she said what she felt? That Hemingway line: “Every writer needs a built-in, shockproof shit detector.” Why is my shit detector going off every time I’m in this really well written scene I wrote? I remember when I was in my twenties at some reading, and some famous writer said, “Oh, it gets harder as you go along.” I didn’t know it then, but I think he was saying that even though you’ve been practicing writing daily for decades and are more nimble than you were when you starred­ you can describe a woman sitting in a chair, with a light behind her, overlooking Boston, maybe a little more deftly than you could thirty years ago—but just because you write well about something doesn’t mean it happened. We get to be such good liars, we’re not writing the truth anymore.

When I write a story, I’m never gripped with the desire to tell the story. I’m gripped with the desire to find the story, to find it. You can’t choose what you’ll be pulled coward. Let me give you an example: For years, off and on, I’ve read in the newspapers about a certain kind of predator. He’s not a sexual predator, not a violent predator—just a guy who does something weird. And it’s always interested me. But, apparently, not enough, because whenever I’ve sat down to write his story, twice now as a novel, it collapses like a house of cards. I did a bunch of research and I wrote really, really hard. I’ve been writing long enough—and I read it. It’s a decent passage; it’s a decent piece of dialogue. Again, ch is the whole notion of: The writing’s not bad; I’ve been doing it a long time. But it feels … It took me years to start saying chis in writing classes: To me, there’s a difference between making something up and imagining it. Just because I want to write from the point of view of this guy doesn’t mean he wants me to be his daddy, doesn’t mean he’s going to come to me.

FRENCH

Did you feel less connected to him as a character?

DUBUS

I felt like an actor pulling off a decent performance. But here’s what happened. I go into his first victim, a woman working in a bank, kind of a pretty, overweight woman. So, okay, I’m going to hop into her point of view, just to find her a little bit, and then I’m going to zap her with my guy. I’ve been writing for three months from his point of view. With two paragraphs of writing from her point of view, she felt ten times more real than he did.This is the mystery I’m talking about. One of the dangers of fine art instruction in graduate programs—undergraduate, whatever, conferences—is that we can demystify the process too much. It’s mysterious to me why this overweight, lonely, pretty woman in a bank is far more real to me, in minutes of writing about her, than this guy. So, okay, I’m going to ignore that feeling. I’m going to keep writing, because I’m going to zap her with my guy, because that’s the fucking novel I want to write, and I’m going to write it! After maybe six days, two weeks of writing, it was so clear that her passage was imagined and real. And his was fake and contrived and better written because of it. Pascal said: “Anything written to please the author is worthless.” I really believe that. I don’t chink we get to do what we want to do. I believe writing is an act of humility, of opening yourself to something larger and allowing it in, no matter how you feel about it. So that lady turned into the first novella in the book coming up. She never even saw the guy again. He was like a Hollywood set held up by telephone poles. I let him go.

FRENCH

Have you had other characters you felt distant from, who you had to work harder to understand?

DUBUS

Lester in House of Sand and Fog.

FRENCH

His point of view is very brief.

SALVATORE

And it’s close-third, as opposed to the two firsts. What happened with Lester?

DUBUS

Here’s the thing: I know Sand and Fog became a big success, but I’m haunted by it. I think a better writer would have written a better book, and I’d like another stab at it. One of the challenges for me was Lester. I’ve got these alternating first-person points of view. Now, this is it again: back to mystery, right? The Colonel—I tried all these various points of view—he would not come, until I got to first-person present, which I didn’t want to write in, because I wrote a lot of my first book in first-person present. I said, “It’s too intimate, too close.” But he would always show up in the present. And then Kathy would only show up in first-person past. I tried all these points of view. Isn’t it weird that the only present-tense character in the book doesn’t survive it? He can’t tell it in the past tense. That was not conscious at all—just intuition.

When I get to Lester, Kathy’s in the house. She’s drunk and suicidal, and the Colonel’s gone. I’m thinking, Oh, this is great, man. This might actually be a positive thing for once in my writing life. But then, it’s fucking Lester, sitting on the porch. I kind of stared at the page for a while, and I just kept seeing Lester. I’m just staring and there he is. I see him waiting. I remember thinking, Fuck! I don’t want to get his point of view. I’ve got, like, a hundred and eighty pages in their points of view. Isn’t it kind of late to bring him in? I thought, I’m not bringing him in. I’m going to go back to them. But they were just in a tableau.

I kept seeing him on that foggy porch in the fish camp in the woods, waiting for her. I said, I don’t want to write about you, motherfucker, but I guess I have to. I went in with a first-person narrator, because I had this little rule in my head: You can’t go from two first-persons to a third. What the fuck? I have to do it first. So I did a first-present. He sounded like a bad piece of matinee cowboy writing. “I’m waiting for my woman on the porch. Where is my cute, little alcoholic sex … ” It was awful. I tried first-person past, and it was worse. I tried third-person subjective, but it was still a little more distant—the third. A little alarm went off: You can’t go to a third-person POV! And I thought, why not? All of a sudden, I could feel him. I could feel him far more than I could before, but I still felt, all the way through him, through this whole section, he was saying … With the two first-person points of view, it was two hands pushing this way: “Back off, Jack.” When I finally found the third-person subjective voice, one hand was saying, “All right, come on,” and the other one was saying, “Back off.” For a while, I felt like an artistic failure to not have both hands pulling me in, as I felt with Kathy and the Colonel, bur then I said, ” No, this is you, motherfucker. This is how you are. You’ve got a guard up, don’t you? You’re an inauthentic kind of dude. I’m just going to let you be.”

FRENCH

I recently looked at House of Sand and Fog and a few other multiple-viewpoint novels for what I’m writing now. I was trying to organically follow all my characters’ voices, how they spoke to me, and was concerned the points of view weren’t all marching. I had that same moment of—Really? Am I allowed to do that? So it was helpful to see what you had done, mixing first-person past, first-person present, and third-person past, and say, “Oh, sure, you can do that.”

DUBUS

That’s why reading is so important for writers. I’m mystified when I hear people say they don’t read when they’re writing. Are you kidding me? I remember hearing this story about Richard Yates at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I heard my father say it years later—that he had two points of view in the same sentence, and everyone said, “Oh, you can’t do that!” And he said, “Well, I just did.”

Again, that great line from O’Connor: “The writer can do whatever she can get away with. Unfortunately, none of us have ever been able to get away with much.” This notion that the art is larger than the artist, that there’s such a thing as dramatic unity, and effect, and aesthetics, and some things hold, and some things don’t. It’s endlessly exciting. I’ve been doing this for—I don’t even want to say it, because I’ve only published five books—but I’ve been doing this for thirty years, five, six days a week. The only time I didn’t was when we had our kids. For, like, three days I didn’t, and then when I had pneumonia twice. I’m as excited about it as when I began, because it’s such a descent into the unknown. It’s scary and exalted, and I love stepping into the not-knowing. I think one of the dangers of being a successful writer, in terms of books and publications and money and all that shit, is I think you can run the risk of becoming more a thinker than a dreamer. I’m trying not to do that.

SALVATORE

I’m going to return to Lester for a moment. At some point, he takes the bullets out of the gun and gives them to Kathy. And at one point, he thinks, I could have told that kid, “It’s not going to work; there are no bullets in there.” And he might have stopped the whole thing from going down. You talk about struggling to create Lester. But Lester was probably, in terms of Greek tragedy, the one that scared me the most­, how easily you can go from being an upstanding citizen to falling in ways you never could have imagined.

DUBUS

The truth is, the inauthentic feeling, I ultimately concluded, was him. He did not feel like a contrived character to me, or I wouldn’t have left him in. I would have rewritten the whole rest of the book. I am mortified to say that there is so much Lester in me. I’ve never been a cop, I’ve never had a gun, but it is no stretch for me to imagine going from being an upstanding citizen to some guy in a jail cell.

FRENCH

And to save the victim, right? That’s really what he was doing. He was partially motivated by saving a woman, who he felt something terrible was happening to.

DUBUS

Which brings me back to this notion of imagining versus making up. I’m writing from her point of view, but at first I didn’t know she was an alcoholic. I knew she was a cokehead, but I’ve met cokeheads who could drink, I’ve met alcoholics who can do a line of coke, but not go down the coke road, and then there are those who have dual addictions. I thought, Maybe she’s not an alcoholic. Maybe her husband was alcoholic and into cocaine. Maybe she’s just a recovering cokehead. Lester’s pouring the wine on that date, and she’s drinking, and I was actually surprised to see it escalate. She’s drinking nips of Bacardi, and now she’s going down the spiral, and she’s at the gas station , getting gas. I’m following her, thinking, All right, so I’m shitfaced, and I’m fucked up, and this mother fucker’s taken my father’s house, and I’m the fuck up of my family, and I see the gas is empty. I wasn’t like: I will now send her to the gas station to get gas to burn down the house. I go get gas, and I see it with Kathy—Motherfuckers, we’re all going down. I’m filling the gas container, and then I go to put it in the trunk, and I see the gun. I forgot the gun was there! She’s looking at it; I’m looking at it over her shoulder, kind of in her skin. We reach for it, and I’m thinking, What the fuck’s going to happen now?

Stephen King says, “To me, these books are found objects.” I thought that was really remarkable and true. But look, none of that can be taught. Ron Carlson says: “Details are for the writer only. They are the instruments by which we steer.” So many younger writers think, Oh, yeah, well, I’ll give him a job later. What do you mean, give him a job later? Are you kidding me? A guy who comes home from working on hearts in an operating room is a different human being than someone who’s been shoveling shit—a different human being than someone who’s been changing bed pans or bundling mortgages and sending them to Taiwan. You must know what your character does all day. Not just that­—sensory detail is so important. We all know, we are more in the room than someone who’s blind and deaf. They’d be in the room in a different way; they have other gifts that come out, but they are not in the room as fully as we are, because they have been robbed of two important senses.

When I write, I’m not bringing in all that sensual detail so much to give the reader a felt experience, although ultimately I do want to give the reader that experience. The main reason I’m bringing in all that detail, though, is so I can be in the body and in the moment with this character to know what’s really going on. Let me give you an example—I’m writing from the point of view of Kathy. I’m waking up in my car. I’m sleeping outside the house that was wrongfully taken from me. I’ve got to pee, and I’ve got to brush my teeth. But I’m hearing power saws. Now, I know that they’re circular saws, because I’m a carpenter, but she’s hearing power saws, and she looks out and there are carpenters, cutting into the roof of her stolen house. Even with the bad taste in my mouth and having to pee, I am now running barefoot across the street: What the fuck! That’s my fucking house! I’m running with her, and what do I see? An upside-down piece of roof sheeting, with a bunch of roofing tacks sticking out, and she steps on it, nine little holes going into the bottom of her foot. She pulls it out. As soon as that happened, as a writer, I’m thinking, Ah, fuck! Now every time she’s in a scene, I’ve got to remember her foot. The writer could say, “Well, fuck it. Maybe she just stubs her toe.” But that would be making it up instead of imagining it. What your imagination gave you was the sheeting with nails, now work with it. Summon the nerve and the faith, and work with it.

Now what happens? Well, one action stories a causal sequence of events with a beginning, middle, and end. Or that causes them to come down. She’s in the house, getting her foot wrapped by this Iranian lady who doesn’t even know who she is, and it’s sweet. Now I’m in this motel room with my wrapped foot, that’s been wrapped all day with an Ace bandage on a hot day. There’s this guy who I, as a writer, don’t know who the fuck he’s sniffing around. I don’t even want him in the story. Why? Because I don’t want to research cops. But he’s sniffing after this woman. I’m not trying to judge, but I’m just allowing him to—okay, here he is. He walks over. She’s unwrapping her foot, because it’s hot, and as she’s starting to unwrap it, she’s afraid it’s going to smell. And that’s right when the handsome, young cop is there and, frankly, she doesn’t know it, but nobody wants to smell bad. She sits back so he doesn’t smell her stinky foot, and when she sits back, he takes that as some sort of invitation to sit on the side of the bed. She’s leaning forward to get more comfortable and then they’re kissing, and then they’re fucking! And I’m writing this thing: Aw, come on. Bullshit! And then I think, Come on! What kind of a prick are you? And then: What is this? What are you, like, a sex addict, too? This is so fucked up. And the next day, my shit detector did not go off. Now I’ve got this cop in my story. That whole novel never would have gone to its catalytic, tragic end, without the introduction of that cop and his gun, which never would have happened if she hadn’t stepped on nails.

SALVATORE

Cause and effect.

DUBUS

That’s all I try to impart in classes. I say, Look. Anyone’s invited to this party; you just need real, authentic curiosity, an ability to dream, and concrete, specific sensual detail. Put those together, and it always leads to characters in trouble. Why? Because everybody’s in trouble all the fucking time. This is another thing that upsets people, especially Americans: All three of us—hopefully none of us have big trouble, but if I scratch the surface a little, we all have some trouble. That’s normal, and that’s where stories lie.

SALVATORE

So when Lester sleeps with Kathy, at what point in the writing do you have to figure out why he’s having trouble with his wife, and when and if the backstory with him and his kid will come into it? What’s the relationship between revision and continuing to tell the truth?

DUBUS

I tend to write chronologically, and I allow cause and effect to happen. That’s not to say that the finished story will be in the shape in which I wrote it. With Lester, I begin where I think he begins in the book, which is, he’s waiting: Where is she? She said she’d be here. Why isn’t she here? I just left my wife. It’s like people: some you’re just more attracted to, male or female. You just get along. With Lester, I didn’t want to hang out with him. I would rather hang out with the tyrant, the proud, rigid Colonel.

Actually, let’s talk about the Colonel and then do Lester, because the first few weeks of trying to write from the point of view of this Iranian guy, he wasn’t showing up, and I finally figured out why he wasn’t showing up. I found the first-person voice pretty soon, but he still wasn’t showing up. I realized I was judging him. I realized I thought, You’re a prick. You were with SAVAK, the CIA-controlled death squads. You were a piece of shit. You’re just some powerful bastard. It was totally unconscious on my part. There’s that great line from Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. He said, “You know, Max, the writer’s job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.” I wasn’t seeking to understand, but I thought I was. Again, it’s like convincing yourself you’re kissing her and you’re really turned on, but something’s not happening. I had this plywood desk I built in our little apartment and I was staring at the plywood. I cut it with a dull blade, and it was a shitty cut, and I was thinking, You don’t do anything right. You don’t go get a sharp blade. And then thinking, You know what? You’re judging this motherfucker. And what happens in life when you feel prejudged by someone? You say, “Fuck you.” I think the same is true of characters. He felt prejudged by me, and he said, “Fuck you.” So I’m looking at this shitty jigsaw cut, and I said, “Why don’t you really try to understand this guy?” I remember asking, “What’s it like?”

Charlie Rose asked Mike Nichols, the director, “What’s the main question the storyteller asks?” Nichols said, “Well, it’s not the main question the newspaper reporter asks. The main question the newspaper reporter has to ask before writing his or her story is, ‘What happened?’ What the storyteller asks is not, ‘What happened?’ but, ‘What’s it like? What’s it really like to be in this thing that’s happened?”

So now I’m going to be more open, less judgmental: What’s it really like to be a guy like you, from your culture, working with these blue-collar people? As soon as I felt myself embrace genuine curiosity, he showed up, and he stayed. The same thing with Lester—you asked about Lester’s marriage and all that. I had far less judgment against Lester. I was just a little irked that I had to go to the third-person point of view and to another character two hundred pages into the story, but that’s what was presenting itself. It was a much shorter trip to genuine curiosity about Lester, but I remember thinking, Okay, who are you, anyway? I called the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department, and got a hold of a Captain John Wells. I probably made twenty calls to him over the next few months. It was a matter of: What’s it really like to be a field­ trained officer, seven o’clock, after a twelve-hour shift training younger cops, just left your wife, you’re on the porch, you’re kind of horny and lonely, probably hungry, and you want a drink, and she’s not here. You had that sweet kiss—just the one. And now, it’s like acting: Where is she? And now I’m in the car, driving, going into Lester.

FRENCH

Writing a novel takes such a long time—so much of it spent in that dream state you spoke of, not knowing your characters yet, not knowing where you are going.

DUBUS

Yes, no matter what’s going on in your life—a novel can take a long time. That one took four years; The Garden of Last Days took five-and­-a-half years; Bluesman took three years; The Cage Keeper took six years; Townie I tried to write for twenty-eight years, three different times. You’re going to go through all sorts of highs and lows and changes in those years, but your novel doesn’t. This whole notion of imagining versus making up: I cannot tell you how many sex scenes and meal scenes I’ve written, drinking scenes, that I cut. You’re bringing yourself to the characters, but you cannot bring your literal life to the page; you have to find a way to begin to turn it over to them. I think some of the sex is too explicit in House of Sand and Fog. I mean, there’s this blowjob. Why do I need that? But I remember why I wrote it so explicitly, and I actually cut two or three moments from that, because I needed to find out what they had together. I still am not sure. I think there was more needy, addictive sex than lovemaking between them, but I needed to write it explicitly to find out. I could feel her need for him. I felt a lot of addictive, desperate need, and not a lot of love.

SALVATORE

I remember thinking the scene with Lester and Kathy was about disconnected intimacy from his wife, a dearth of intimacy for this guy. So he comes together with this woman who might be looking for a connection through sex. It’s the moment they both have, a collision that was honest, albeit damaged.

DUBUS

I’ve met couples over the years who are companions, or lovers. I can’t tell you how many marriages I’ve seen where they’ll tell you they haven’t had sex in five years or something, and they seem to have a solid union. You know where Lester came from? One of the things I cut out of Townie was—I went to Mexico with a bounty hunter, looking for a contract killer. I was twenty-two and had a fake name, and the guy was a bad, bad guy. We went to gay bars, bisexual whorehouses, because he was bisexual. I was meeting with US Marshals and FBI agents, DEA guys from New York, and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. One night, three in the morning, I’d done some surveillance on a diamond thief. I actually did this for like six months, and it was interesting, but I cut it from Townie, because Townie had its own narrative arc. This felt like a whole other narrative arc. So I cut it. I was a quiet boy, just listening and sitting across from a US Marshal, who had just come from a raid that night. He had this crooked mustache. He was kind of handsome. He looked more like an English teacher than a US Marshal. He looked like he shouldn’t be carrying his gun. He was talking tough and almost blew off this guy’s head, but I thought, This guy looks like he should be teaching Ezra Pound somewhere. Fifteen years later he shows up in my story.

FRENCH

You just said you were a quiet boy. My interaction with you as a student, or later if reading an interview or catching something that you’ve done over the years, always showed you to be this incredibly gregarious, open, warm, no-boundaries person. So I was struck by the Andre in Townie, who seemed much more solitary and introspective, even brooding. How do you connect those two parts of you to being a writer?

DUBUS

When you talk about those two selves, the truth is I was scared. Writing Townie brought that back, and educated me to that conscious fear. I spent most of my youth afraid. I was afraid all the time. I was a bright kid, and I was in blue-collar neighborhoods, where articulate, bright kids get stomped, so I always hid my smarts the way a lot of women do.

I got back in touch with me writing Townie: I was physically small, sedentary, weak and terrified—and bright and depressed. Then all the suffering changed, and I willed my way out of it. I became violent, and then I became who I always was. I think if I’d grown up in a safe environment, the way I’m raising my kids, I would have been the class clown. I would have raised my hand. I wouldn’t have been ashamed. I once wrote a paper on Walt Whitman that I snuck to the teacher, because I didn’t want anybody to know I wrote the paper on the homosexual poet. I was up till three in the morning, making it really good. I didn’t do a lot of homework. I wasn’t a good student. But I loved Leaves of Grass.

It was learning to defend myself that I fought my way onto my own two feet. So, you know, motherfucker, I deserve to be here, too. What do I mean by “here”? On the planet. My brother was really hard to write about in that book. I took a more traditional male route, where I rook all my hurt and converted it into rage, and I became homicidal. If I’d been an athlete, I could have taken that rage and thrown a football or swung a bat, but I used my fists and feet. My brother did what a lot of girls do—which is a generalization, but I think there’s some truth to it—he took all his hurt and rage and turned it inward. He got depressed and sick and wanted to die. I felt it was important to have his suicidal route and my homicidal route. But it was my homicidal route that led me to the nerve it takes to write.

I don’t know if I’ll put this in the book, but I’ve been thinking about it since. You know when I write about that membrane? Joe and I just met. If l reached out and touched his cheek, I’d be violating his personal space. But it was in that first fight that I really found out what it was. I saw a shoving match between two fathers at a kids’ hockey game a few years ago—”Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?” They’re pushing and shoving each other in the parking lot, and I looked at them, and I thought, Neither one of them is a fighter. Neither one, because there’s no foreplay in fighting. None. We’re in it—BOOM! My point is, anyone can learn to throw a punch, and it’s good and it’s valuable, but for experienced fighters, it’s like a psychological hymen, and once you break it, it’s always broken. Once you punch someone as hard as you can in their face, you’ve learned to violate the intimacy of another human being, and you’ll always know how to do it. And, frankly, it’s hard not to reach for that. It’s like having a gun; it’s like having a nuclear bomb.

I’m not going to belabor everything that’s in Townie, but I don’t think I wrote about this directly, and I’ve been thinking about it. I’m an uncle figure for a lot of young people, and one of them is a young woman I’ve known since she was a kid. She’s twenty-seven, twenty-eight now, and she’s got a boyfriend who was a brawler from Haverhill—real rough kid. He and I were drunk one night, and kind of reminiscing about fighting, and I was a little ashamed, because I was really reminiscing. We both admitted we kind of miss that moment right before it’s going to happen, where you’re squaring off and you might get killed. There’s such an adrenaline high to the physical combat that’s about to happen. You don’t know this guy; you don’t know how dangerous he is; you don’t know how much crazier he is than you are, and it’s up to you and your body to get out of this. There’s a real thrill and a nerve to step into that unknown. You talked about the quiet me, and, yeah, I am outgoing and gregarious. I was always, but I was afraid to be that way, because I would get stomped. Once I got through the violent years, I realized there’s a similarity between the nerve it takes to step into a combat situation and the nerve it takes to try to enter the skin of another human being with a pencil.

SALVATORE

Another membrane?

DUBUS

Another membrane—when you go, Why can’t I be her? Why can’t I go all the way?

FRENCH

Are you saying that gaining nerve through violence helped you have the nerve to imagine yourself as a writer?

DUBUS

I’m hesitant to say this out loud, because I don’t want any young man or woman thinking, I’m going to go kick some ass so I can be a writer. I don’t think anyone’s going to take it literally, but the truth is, with my little path in life, it’s hard to imagine that I would have found writing any other way. I had to fight my way onto my own two feet, to stand there and plant myself and say, “You know, I’m not a piece of shit. I have a life, and I’m going to live it.” Once I worked through all that and survived physically and didn’t hurt anyone too bad, I think I did find myself in a place where I thought: Okay, now I can start. But it was totally unconscious.

SALVATORE

There’s something about the way you’ve talked about your writing ritual—a daily act of trying to become the other, your own relationship to a Creator, even your atheism—which suggests a spiritual side. Is that side connected to your art? I was thinking about your father’s daily practice of Mass and then writing and running.

DUBUS

Let’s talk about the ritual. Because I think that’s what you’re talking about more than anything. I reread an essay of my dad’s recently, maybe “A Father’s Story,” in which he writes, “Belief is believing in God. Faith is believing that God believes in you.”

I do not believe there’s a God who loves you. I do not believe there is a loving Creator who knows me and loves me. I feel deeply alone, and whatever good happens to me comes from my hard work, and that’s it. I think there’s value to feeling alone. So there’s that versus ritual. If you look at the word “ritual,” it comes from the Latin ritus: it means “river.” When you step into ritual, you’re stepping into some ancient river. I have pagan rituals, and I’ve never told anyone, but I’ll just share it with you. I’ve got to have a cup of black coffee—dark roast, French Roast, organic. Black. I begin each writing day reading poetry. I’ve got about four hundred volumes of poetry, and every time I do a reading in a bookstore, I buy a book of poems. I love poetry; I don’t write it, but I love it. Right now, I’m reading The Great Fire by Jack Gilbert. If I’m procrastinating, I’ll read six or seven poems, and I might read two poems, back to back. Then I’ll sharpen my pencil with a blade. I’ve never told anyone this, but I’ll tell you: My wife—I’m hesitant to do it. It’s funny how we don ‘t talk too much. Fuck it. If it has power, it’s just superstition, but it’s so interesting the superstitions here, because, again, there’s a great line in ancient Chinese: “If the mad dog comes at you, whistle for him.” My wife gave me two stones: one’s a piece of quartz that represents love, and the other is a piece of aventurine—green—that has to do with creativity. I hold those two stones in my left hand the whole time I’m writing.

FRENCH

Even when you were in the car, did you do that?

DUBUS

No, and not when I’m traveling, I don’t bring the stones, because I’m afraid of losing them. They stay in my cave. But also, one of the first writers who really influenced me was Breece Pancake. Have you read his story “Trilobites”? I turned a friend of mine on to that story—he’s actually the bounty hunter I worked with, and in his world travels he found a fossilized trilobite, and sent it to me. The trilobite’s on my desk, and then a dear brother of mine, who was an artist, brought me back a bottle of water from the Delphi Oracle in Greece. That’s been on my desk for twenty years. I write with these stones in my hand; I write with a sharpened pencil; I have headphones on, for complete silence; I have the Delphi Oracle water, the fucking trilobites; the ghost of Breece Pancake; and then, lastly, there’s a little piece of alder wood that my cousin put two holes in, and now it’s a pencil holder. That’s on my desk, too. And my Mead composition book. I am all about ritual. I’m a pagan. I ain’t no Catholic.

I remember when Doctorow said he writes in front of a blank wall. He said the only reason he doesn’t write in front of window, or in front of a photograph or painting or inspiring quotes is because that blank wall makes him go back to his sentences. I write in front of a blank wall. But I really am merciless about my mornings. Mornings are the dream time.

FRENCH

Early mornings?

DUBUS

I’m not an early dude. I’ve got to get my eight hours. I go to the university twice a week, and I don’t have to be there till, like, two in the afternoon. I’ll get my two youngest to their high school, Fontaine’s at her dance studio. I get my coffee, go to my cave, and I’m there from 8:30 to about 11:00, and that’s it, and then I go about my day. Sometimes it’s not that long. For many years, my magic writing time was an hour and fifteen minutes. That’d be about fifteen minutes of staring, then about twelve minutes of foreplay, then about forty minutes of hard work, ten minutes of cool down, thinking about lunch and phone bills. You’re out of there. But you can get a lot done in seventy-five minutes a day.

I’m not convinced more time is helpful. My old man, when he was crippled, had a tiny end table where he kept his medications, reading material, ashtray; he was laid up for months. He asked me to build him a larger table. I built one out of pine, three times the size. So he put his medication there, his book. In a week, that whole fucking thing was full. I said, “Dad, why do I have a feeling that if I built you a six-foot table, that’s going to be equally full?”

SALVATORE

We were talking about the quiet kid who comes through the fire, but I’ve been thinking about the spiritual side of you and this thing you do. Not only the feminine side I think I see, but the teacher. You can really quote stuff—not only quote it, but you live it; it’s not an act. And you’ve got so much committed to memory. I feel like some of this scuff suggests a kind of secular ritual, where these are almost like prayers for you, secular prayers. You have so many of those. Was that a part of the way you were reaching yourself?

DUBUS

I have poems memorized. For that reason. They really are like secular prayers. I think I retain what helps me, and I think what helps me is when someone has articulated what I’ve intuitively felt and never known. Then the words are there for me to give to someone else, if it’s helpful to them. I do say, often, that I’m full of shit in so many ways, but what I really mean, where I’m really full of shit is I talk like an atheist, but I feel like a holy man. So I feel like a fraud. Instead of the holy man who’s the fraud, I feel like the secular guy who’s a fraud. I knew a woman who was going through a horrible time. She was raised Irish Catholic, and she doesn’t pray, she said, “Because I don’t believe in God, and I think it would be hypocritical of me to pray now that I need him.” I said, “That makes sense.” I said, “You know, I pray all the time, and I don’t believe in God.” Right now, my son’s driving from Ohio to Florida with a bunch of frat boys to party all week, so I’m praying my ass off about that, because I have to. But the truth is, I do believe—and studies have shown—people fighting cancer. You’ve heard of this study? They had two groups. One group of people fighting cancer were prayed for by five hundred people—they didn’t know they were being prayed for—and another group was not prayed for. The group that was prayed for, eighty percent did better than those who were not prayed for.

I have a hard time believing in a strong head honcho. I don’t believe it, and I don’t believe there’s a God who knows my name. I’m a nameless speck. But I’m a sacred speck, as you are a sacred spec k. Have you read “The Magic Show” by Tim O’ Brien? There’s a wonderful line in there: “Writers tend to be the kind of people who want to enter the mystery of things.” I think that’s true of readers, too.

SALVATORE

The kid in Townie was scared, as you said. He was traumatized. And I’m hearing about different spiritual aspects in your life. This sensitivity strikes me as a characteristic of people who suffer from PTSD; one of the characteristics of PTSD is a hyper-awareness to the world.

DUBUS

Yep. I was in a Mexican restaurant with my wife, Fontaine, about five years ago, and something was really weird about the dinner. First, we were having a date, just the two of us, and then I realized, Oh, wow. I’ve got my back to the restaurant. I hadn’t sat like that in twenty years. I said, ” Honey, my back’s not to the wall.” She said, “You Want to switch?” I said, “No. I’m going to do it. I’ll have another round, though.” Writing Townie rustled up some emotional sediment. I feel post-trauma coming back. Every day before I work out, I’ll do this joint-loosening warm­ up that’s part martial arts yoga, and I’ve got my eyes shut when I do this stuff, and I see the workout I’m about to do. For ten or fifteen years now, I can shut my eyes in a gym; since writing Townie, I can’t shut my eyes. I shut my eyes, and I feel some body coming after me to fuck me up. So my eyes are open again. I am always standing in a room, scanning it.

FRENCH

So writing this memoir wasn’t healing in some ways? Instead, it brought everything back?

DUBUS

It was both cathartic and wounding; it cleansed me and fucked me up. I think maybe one reason I try to describe the scene in a precise way is I need to know where I am in the room.

FRENCH

In one scene in Townie, there’s a full paragraph of sensory description—I think it might be at Salisbury Beach.

DUBUS

I read that last night at the Literary Death Match.

FRENCH

It touches every sense, and that happens so much throughout Townie. I wonder if it is a way, like you said, of grounding yourself, but it also does the same for the reader—because Townie isn’t as linear and cohesive as your novels are; it’s fragmented, a little more reflective of memory.It jumps back and forth in time and age, but it also grounds the reader in setting and scene. I would read a paragraph or two—sometimes it would just be sensory detail—and as a reader I knew exactly where I was: sound, sight, smell.

DUBUS

First of all, my memory’s not that good. Words, quotes are in my head, song lyrics are in my head, poems are in my head. I can see a movie tonight, and I won’t remember it next month—it will be a new movie. I forget what happens in books, too. I remember lines, but I won’t remember stories. So how can I write a memoir? This I find really poignant about human beings: If you look at the word “to remember,” it means the opposite of”dismember.” Chop, chop, chop. To remember means to put back together. Which is why I believe the better memoirs for me are the ones where I feel them sincerely trying to put something back together. Once again, what’s fueling the writing, even though it’s about your own life, is curiosity. Like, I know what happened in my childhood, but What the fuck happened?

FRENCH

We were asking that question, too, of you: Is this really writing by discovery? If you already know the story?

DUBUS

Go back to Mike Nichols’s line: “What’s it like? What’s it really like to be in this thing that’s happened?” What I found about writing Townie was: Okay, thank God, I’m off the hook for having to come up with the events of the story, the way we do with a novel or short story. I know the events: That’s the night I got my ass kicked, and I almost got beaten to death. If the cops hadn’t shown up, I might have died that night. My creative powers are free to try to capture, What’s it like? What’s it really like?

Back to sensory detail: I find at least three in each scene to activate it. But with Townie, I used it as a way to open my memory, not consciously; I just noticed that it kept happening that way, so I kept it up. I’ll give you an example: I write about Old Newburyport, which really was a tough, ugly, abandoned waterfront town. I met a guy at the gym last week, who’s ten years older than me. He said, “My name’s Bruce. I grew up there. No one could fucking walk down that street. You’d get your ass kicked. Even if you lived on that street.” We were talking. I remember staring at the page, seeing how isolated my brother and I were, how we were the new kids, and it was a tough town, and all the kids were cruel, and we had no uncles and no father around and no mother around—because she’s working fourteen hours a day—and we would sit on the stoop. So, I’m going to write about sitting on that stoop on a summer day. What’s it like? What’s it really like to be in this thing?

I tried to capture the hot sun, and then the smell—that fucking broken sidewalk in front of our little house always smelled like dried piss, from the drunks who would stumble home from the barroom. A drunk really did wander into our foyer and piss on the floor. Here I am, the older writer, remembering forty years earlier: I could smell the hot piss, the dried piss, and now I smell this sweet smell on the paint. The older writer knows it’s lead paint, flaking lead paint. I’m trying to describe two smells and the feel of the hot sun on our faces, and then, all of a sudden, a panel opens in my memory: Oh, yeah! One of those days, Cody Perkins and those three guys see us, and they start chasing us. And now, Yeah, we fucking ran! Oh, that ‘s right! We ran through the lumberyard! I remember, We jumped over the fence! We got away! We went underneath the pier. Oh! That’s when the fucking drowned guy gets pulled out! When I sat down to write that day, I wasn’t thinking, This is the day I write about the drowned man to show thematically the danger of mortality. I just remembered: What’s it like to sit on that fucking stoop? Back to Ron Carlson: “Details are the instruments by which we steer.” That writing session ended with us walking underneath the pier, where I wanted to stay until dark to avoid those guys, but we didn’t want to see the dead guy. All of it I’d forgotten until I wrote that. What triggered it was genuine curiosity and sensual derail, which opened panels into my memory.

FRENCH

That makes me think of the Nadine Gordimer quote: “Writing is making sense of life.” Because you went back and discovered and relieved these memories and could maybe look at things more objectively, did you make more sense of your life?

DUBUS

I did. I needed to put the pieces back together to become more whole. I think something shifted, changed. Probably the whole time I was writing it, I thought, This is not going to be a book. It’s just too private. But I’m turning fifty. Richard Dreyfuss has this great line: “When you’re turning fifty,” he said, “you’re probably closer to your grave than your high school graduation.” I felt, this is going to be for my kids. They’re going to know me better, and they’re going to know where they come from better. I thought, I’m not going to make this a book. That freed me to write more honestly. I saw Mailer in an interview once, it might have been with Dick Cavett: “So, Mailer, you’ve lived such a large life. Why haven’t you written a memoir? You have so much co write about.” Mailer said, “I don’t think writers should write memoirs.” And Cavett or whoever said, ” Why?” This spooked the shit out of me. Mailer said, “I think a writer’s childhood is like a piece of quartz. In every play or novel that you write is light you shine through the quartz at different angles, which has its own spectrum of colors. I’m afraid if I write directly about the quartz, I’ll lose my art.” So I’m thinking, Fuck! What am I doing to my quartz? And then I realized, if I never write another word of fiction again, if I’m all done, well, I’m all done, because I so need to tell this story. Then I thought , You know what, Norman? Aren’t there other quartzes? What about the quartz of being a husband and father? What about the quartz of being a teacher? What about the quartz of being a carpenter?

Finishing Townie put something behind me. I’d already noticed something weird happening: I’ve never been able co write about the Merrimack Valley in my fiction. All my fiction is based somewhere else. My old man set all his stories in the Merrimack Valley. I remember ch is interview with Updike, and he called my father the Bard of the Merrimack Valley. I remember reading chat and thinking, He wasn’t the Bard of the Merrimack Valley. He doesn’t write about this place. It wasn’t a criticism; it was an observation. Maybe Kerouac might have been a little bit the Bard of the Merrimack Valley; maybe Greenleaf Whittier. My father’s art was formed in some mysterious way, the way all our art is, through the circumstances of his childhood: in 1930s-’40s French-Irish Catholic south Louisiana. Catholicism was huge. Being a Marine was huge. Then the ’60s come—that went into the pot. All the other mysterious forces created Andre Dubus’s art. He finds himself living in New England, this displaced Southerner, and he sets his stories in the town in which he finds himself, because that was his artistic inclination. But he never wrote about the Merrimack Valley. He set stories there the way Faulkner set stories in Yoknapatawpha County. It was his Yoknapatawpha County, but I felt like he never wrote about this place. There was no frustration—well, there was a little bit of frustration, but not much—I just thought it was really inaccurate of Updike to say that.

Since writing Townie, this accidental memoir that comes from an essay about baseball and my son—these novellas I’ve coming out in the fall are all set in Merrimack Valley. It’s like I had written about it literally, having grown up there, being a mill town kid, from an educated family, and now I’m free to dream about it. I couldn’t do that before.

FRENCH

You had one story in The Cage Keeper that’s highly autobiographical.

DUBUS

“Wolves in the Marsh.”

FRENCH

Was that harder for you to write at that time?

DUBUS

Yes. John Irving said, “I think that there are at least two kinds of writers: Those whose vision is more somber and tragic, and chose whose voice and vision are more comic.” I think about other differences between writers: Those who are more painterly, and those who are more auditory. Hemingway was painterly; Faulkner was auditory. It’s all about voice and language with Faulkner. With Hemingway, if you gave him some brushes, I bet he could have painted. Then there are writers who can create fiction directly, derivatively from their lives, and those who cannot. My father, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, just to name a few, could write derivatively from their lives. My father’s vision was narrow and deep— extremely deep—but he wrote derivatively from his life. I recognize ex-wives. I recognize us kids in his work. I recognize friends in his work. A friend of mine read my first two books and said, “Where are you in your work?” I said, “I don’t want you to know. I’m trying to be these people.”

I don’t think one is better than another, but I realized, finally, “Wolves in the Marsh” was hard to write because it was too derivative. I’m not a writer who can write from my life. Townie I tried to write three times as a novel. I probably put eight or nine years of writing into it. First it was called Lie Down and Make Angels, and it was terrible. Whenever the father figure came out, based on my father, I made him look worse than he was. The mother: I made her look worse. Whenever little Sean Dolan appeared—me—I made him look better than he was. It was dishonest. Capote says, “A writer must write as cool and detached as a surgeon.” I didn’t have the detachment. Finally, I was able to write it as this accidental memoir, and it has freed me, in some ways. I have wrestled some things into place inside me, but nothing simple, because my post-traumatic stress is back again.

SALVATORE

Can you tell us a little bit about the forthcoming novellas? You talked about how you’ve shifted a little. Are they more autobiographical, other than just the geography?

DUBUS

No, they’re not. The book’s called Dirty Love. One story is from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old girl and the eighty-one-year-old great-uncle she lives with. Another is from the point of view of a fifty-six­ year-old man whose wife just cheated on him, and their marriage is going down the tubes. Another is from the point of view of this woman looking for love. Nothing directly autobiographical, but I realized … Here’s a beautiful line from Willa Cather: “A writer is at her best only when writing within the character in range of her deepest sympathies.” I asked myself, Where are my deepest sympathies? I don’t like global warming! Homelessness is mean! No! It’s only after you’ve written something that you discover the answers, right? I’m thinking about Bluesman: It was the third novel I wrote, but it’s such a first novel. It’s overwritten, and what haunts me most about this book when I look back-the guy who directed House of Sand and Fog said about Bluesman,”It was an okay book, but it didn’t seem like your book.” I realized I wrote that book outside the range of my deepest sympathies.

There was a lot of me in that Iranian military man in House of Sand and Fog, there was a lot of me in addictive Kathy; there’s a lot of me in fucked up Lester. I was trying to put a lot of me into these characters, but it was more from the outside in Bluesman. I am haunted by that book, because I feel as if l wrote it outside the range of my deepest sympathies. It’s all subconscious; it’s all the dream world. Again: imagined versus made up. You only know that when you are with your center, when you hold the stones, and sharpen the pencil, and stare and wait.

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Thomas Lynch is Milford, Michigan’s funeral director, a job he took over from his father in 1974. Through his examination of death and mortality, Lynch has found much inspiration for his writing. But to label his work as being about death would be an oversimplification. A 1998 Publishers Weekly review stated that “The combined perspectives of his two occupations—running a family mortuary and writing—enable Lynch to make unsentimental observations on the human condition.” Though Lynch often builds from themes of death and grief, his writing moves across the spectrum of life, offering flashes of humor and insight along the way.

He says of himself, “I write sonnets and I embalm, and I’m happy to take questions on any subject in between those two.”

In 1970, Lynch took his first of many trips to Ireland, reconnecting with family in West Clare. He has since inherited the ancestral cottage there, where he regularly spends time. His relationship with Ireland is documented in his most recent book of nonfiction, Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans.

Lynch is also the author of three books of poetry: Still Life in Milford, Skating with Heather Grace, and Grimalkin & Other Poems. Lynch has also authored two essay collections: The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, winner of the Heartland Prize for nonfiction, the American Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award; and Bodies in Motion and at Rest, winner of The Great Lakes Book Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Paris Review, Harper’s, Esquire, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Irish Times, and the Times of London. We spoke with him over lunch at Café Dolce in Spokane, Washington.

AARON WEIDERT

You associate a great amount of humor with death in your writing. Do you write with that juxtaposition in mind?

THOMAS LYNCH

I don’t set out to write anything “jokey.” But I do think that the way things organize themselves, the good laugh and the good cry are fairly close on that continuum. So the ridiculous and the sublime—they’re neighbors. I think that’s just the way it works. If you’re playing in the end of the pool where really bad shit can happen, then really funny shit can happen, too. And then there are times you just take on a voice, where you’re consciously thinking sort of in hyperbolic tones, and then, as long as you go with it, it’s fine.

MANDY IVERSON

Being an undertaker has obviously influenced your writing. How do you write multiple essays and books on the same subject?

LYNCH

I’m not conscious, starting, of where I’m going with it. I’ve said before, and I think it bears repeating, what Yeats said to Olivia Shakespeare—that the only subjects that should be compelling to a studious mind are sex and death. Those two, those are the bookends. And think of it, what else do we think of, what else is there besides that?

I write sonnets and I embalm, and I’m happy to take questions on any subject in between those two. I think most people are that way. I think most people drive around all day being vexed by images of mortality and vitality. All they’re wondering about is how they’re going to die and who they’re going to sleep with, or variations on that theme—what job they’re going to have, whether they’re tall enough or skinny enough or short enough or smart enough or fast enough or make enough money, and all of it plays into these two bookends.

If you’re writing about life, you’re writing about death. If you’re writing about life, you’re writing about love and grief and sex and all that stuff. Once I go outside those pales, I’m trafficking in what is, for me, not only the unknown, but also just not interesting.

IVERSON

Does a nonfiction writer need to have an interesting life?

LYNCH

My work as a funeral director is like most people’s work. Parts of it are routine and dull. Parts of it are hilarious. Parts of it are very, very compelling.

Alice Fulton is a poet I much admire and have been friends with for a long time. When she began teaching at Michigan, I said to her, “Alice, you might be better off waiting tables than teaching students, because you have such a huge voice and you don’t need any other voices interrupting you.” Teachers are constantly being interrupted by the voices of their best students. They have high volume, good students do. So I would think that if you find yourself waiting tables or doing brain surgery or professional wrestling, anything that leaves room for your own sort of imaginative leaps, you’re fine. You’re okay.

It’s handy to be a funeral director—because how we respond to this predicament of death is sort of baseline humanity. I’m very fond of sex, so that’s handy in the other subject that Yeats said was important. That works out well. But I can’t think of any work that you could disqualify from being just as interesting or just as much a metaphor for the human predicament.

WEIDERT

You talk about how your job has its dullness and routines and hilarity. Do you realize later that there’s something there to write about? If it’s not the dullness and not the monotony, at what point do you realize, This is something I could write about?

LYNCH

I’m a writer, so I don’t wait for something interesting. I write. Period. And if there’s nothing interesting, I’ll make it interesting.

My son’s a fly-fishing guide. There are days when the fishing isn’t good. But by God, no one ever goes with him who doesn’t get a good guide. Because he’ll take you down the river and show you things you never saw before. And you will feel the excitement of catching and releasing fish in the most unlikely ways and places. That’s a good guide. Not that you come home with a slab of dead fish, although there are people for whom that’s the deal. For me, writing means I use language about whatever. The world is open to me that way. So if I stopped being a funeral director, I wouldn’t stop writing or stop having things to write about.

For me, writing starts with a line, or some imagination, or some notion, and I just go with it as far as I can. And you know how this works, this idea that you sort of set yourself afloat on the language. And you think, I’ll see how far it can take me before this little raft I’ve cobbled together falls apart and everybody understands that I’m really just a fraud, or drowning—whichever comes first. But when it’s really working, the reader goes with you to the most unlikely places. They take big leaps with you. I think Frost said that “Every poem’s an adventure—you don’t know where you’re going with it.” But you go. And writing nonfiction, essaying, the personal essay, the familiar essay, is exactly the same as far as I’m concerned. This adventure where you are counting on language, you are trusting in the language to keep afloat whatever the notion or image or metaphor or intelligence or opinion or whatever it is you want to get across. The bridgings. And the nice part is that the times you sink, you don’t have to send them out there. Oops, you have to go back and revise it, tie the slats together in a different way, rope the little raft together and then send it out. And see how it goes.

WEIDERT

When the title essay in The Undertaking was first published in The Quarterly, it was titled “Burying.” They’re not quite the same—there are minor revisions throughout. Do you often continue to revise, even once work is published?

LYNCH

If you read The Quarterly, that would have been in 1988. It was later published in the London Review of Books—and Harper’s picked it up from there, and I probably made changes all along until it got into the book. I haven’t made changes since. Once it’s out in a book, you figure it’s done. Although, going back over, there are parts I remember in that Sweeney piece that I’d like to mess around with. I won’t be doing that soon.

WEIDERT

In “The Undertaking,” you write that people think you have “some irregular fascination with, special interest in, inside information about, even attachment to, the dead.” The implication seems to be that it isn’t true and yet so many of your essays deal explicitly with death. Do you see that as a contradiction?

LYNCH

In “The Undertaking,” I followed that up by saying something like, “A dentist is a dentist, but he has no particular fondness for root canals or bad gums.” That is sort of his office in brief, to take care of that, but what I wanted to point out is that it is not death—death as a subject is dull, mum, it says nothing—but all the meanings attached to the dead that are the basic stuff of human beings.

When anthropologists are trying to figure out the place at which that walking anthropoid crossed the human barrier, it is when the anthropoid began to notice its mortality. I mean, that is the signature event—that we do something about mortality. Other living, breathing, sexy things don’t. Cocker spaniels, rhododendrons—they don’t bother with that stuff. They don’t seem to care about others of their kind dying. We do. And that, to me, is the signature of the species. I could just as easily argue that all I’m writing about is human beings, humanity. And Humanity 101 is mortality. Humanity 102 is sex. Or maybe it’s the reverse. [Laughs.]

IVERSON

Quite a few of your essays deal with political issues: abortion, big business vs. small business, euthanasia. Do you think nonfiction writers have an obligation to engage with the outside world? Or even get political?

LYNCH

Both. We were talking earlier about the reason that poets aren’t read is because we don’t hang any of them anymore; we don’t take them seriously; we don’t think that poetry can really move people to do passionate things. But poets did. Poets could change cultures. Before there was so much contest for people’s attention, poets were the ones who literally brought the news from one place to another, walking from town to town, which is how we got everything to be iambic and memorable and rhymed and metered because the tradition was oral before it was literary. And I do think we are obliged. Maybe it’s not just to opine about the issues of the day, but I think we are obliged to step outside of our own work and consider other writers’ work.

Writers should review writers—to say, “This, you might like.” If we don’t have a go at the marketplace of ideas and writing and poetry and the rest of it, then how can we expect people to just take it up without any sort of guidance? That’s the great regret about the disappearance of the independent bookstore. You can buy a lot more books on Amazon, but you don’t know whether or not you’ll like them or why you should read them. Whereas you stumble into a proper bookstore, and someone on that staff has read the stuff you’re picking up and will tell you, “You won’t like that,” or “Yes, you will,” or “You should try that.”

I think writers, particularly poets, should be in the opinion pages and on the record about certain things. Now, some of that I come by only through experience; I remember the first time I got a call from someone at the New York Times—asking if I’d given any thought to the idea that we could find out who the Unknown Soldier was, from Vietnam, because they’d come up with the DNA technology. They had narrowed it down to two people, and they knew they had the DNA, and they knew if they disinterred the body from Arlington they could tell. And the question of the day was, Should we? They thought maybe I’d have an opinion about that. And I said, “Well, I’ve never thought about that, but now that you mention it, interesting thought. I’ll bet I would have something to say about it.”

And the editor said, “That’s nice. Can you give us eight hundred words by tomorrow at five?”

And I thought, Well, I’m an artist, and they don’t talk to poets like that. And I said, “Well, what’re you going to do for me?”

And he said, “Well, we’re going to give you a million and a half readers.”

And that’s like drugs.

And I said, “Fine, I’ll have it ready for you.” And I did. Course, whores that they are, they had sent out to several other writers—not so artistic, but faster—and they got what they wanted faster, and they booked it. But I did send the piece to the Washington Post and they took it. And I thought, Aha, this is how it works, to be ready for whatever’s there. I’ve been sort of fiddling with the advantageous ever since. I like the idea that eight hundred words could just [snaps fingers] tweak the world a little bit.

WEIDERT

Do you still do that?

LYNCH

Not all the time, but enough so that a year doesn’t often go by that I don’t have a couple pieces in. Because it’s a good exercise—then it’s just like targeting. I can remember thinking I wanted to say something about the wonders of the changes in Ireland, and I thought that St. Patrick’s Day would be the perfect day to get this published in the New York Times. Think of all the Irish-Americans who would read it. So I wrote this piece and I sent it to them the week before. I said, “Now, this is only good for one day.” And by God, they took it.

The nice thing is they title everything. You can come up with the best titles—they change them. But the title they gave it was the most brilliant one—“When Latvian Eyes are Smiling,” they called it, and I loved it, and they had the most beautiful graphic with it. It’s just like playing multidimensional chess with these people. Because they’re all smart young editors who care less who you are or what you do; they just want the best page they can get.

WEIDERT

I’ve read that you consider Dr. Jack Kevorkian a serial killer.

LYNCH

I do think of him as a serial killer, and so possessed of his own importance about his role. I’ve buried suicides, and I’m impressed by their resolve and it bothered me that something on the order of seventy percent of his “patients,” or victims, were women. It seemed like a bizarre and cruel kind of gender-norming. The known fact is that women attempt suicide by a factor of ten compared to men. And men, this is a funny word, “succeed” at suicide more than women. Kevorkian seemed to be like the helpful hand who would sort of level that playing field. But he was not killing terminal cases any more than nonterminal—except in the philosophical sense that we’re all dying—and so, for me, the slippery slope was not all that far between what he was doing and a clinic at the corner where my daughter would go if she didn’t get a prom date—and that’s a painful, painful experience. Why shouldn’t she be able to claim sufficient pain to get her assistance?

I mistrust judges and I mistrust lawyers and I mistrust politicos when it comes to life and death matters. I think they’ve made a mess of war. I think they’ve made a mess of capital punishment. I think they’ve made a mess of abortion. Not because I think there’s a right way or a wrong way to think about reproductive choices. Twenty-five years after Roe v. Wade we’re still carping about it—thirty years now. You have to say it’s not a great law if we’re still carping about it. Settle law when it’s settled, you know. Whatever the outcome, the way they got there was not right. Didn’t work. Hasn’t worked. I’m much more trustful of the woman who puts a pillow over her dying husband’s face to save him another round of chemotherapy. She’ll live with the moral implications, and she might even live with the legal implications, but I’d rather deal with those on a case-by-case basis than have this crackpot man in the van running around doing it.

The thing that was instructive to me was that the talk in the culture about it was so disembodied. It was all sort of like, Isn’t this a nice option; doesn’t this sound nice—“assisted suicide”—which is oxymoronic to begin with. I mean, take the words apart, and there’s no way you can do that. And it wasn’t until we showed it on TV, until we actually saw, that we went, Oh, that’s wrong. And then he went to jail. As soon as we saw it, we knew it was wrong. But for most of four or five years we were going around as if we were having a conversation about radial tires. So yes, I do think of him as a serial killer, and I think he got his proper comeuppance.

IVERSON

Do you have an agenda with your writing?

LYNCH

Well, there are times I do. Most times, the agenda is just to fill my office as a writer. I write. When I write a poem, I do it for the pure pleasure of having that poem on the page. They are to play with. But when it’s done, published, it’s like it has its own digs; you’ve done your part for it. But there are times when I’ve consciously set out to change the discussion on a particular topic. And I think Phillip Lopate is very instructive on this, when he talks about essayists being, among other things, great contrarians. I always look not for the “this or that,” but the “have you thought of it this way?” So that piece on abortion is not necessarily about abortion. It’s about reproductive choices, and the costs of them.

And I don’t know of anybody yet who has figured out exactly where I stand on abortion. I would think it a weakness of the piece if they could say, “Ah, he’s one of those.” Because the job of an essayist is not to be right, left, or center, this or that, but to make people think in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise thought—and to keep as many in the room as you can while you’re doing it. Barack Obama is doing the same thing in his campaign—he’s trying to keep people in the room.

I remember wanting to say something about the shame and sadness of this war and how to frame that. I was sitting over in Ireland in August one year, reading about the president going off to Crawford, Texas, and I thought, I’ll write something about the president and me, because he was on his ranch, I was on mine. So I did. And they took it, which was very nice, because it was another one of those pieces that was only good for three or four days, and they took it. I don’t think the president reads the New York Times, but people who work for him do, so at least it got to be part of the conversation.

WEIDERT

Have you ever had any backlash from that?

LYNCH

I wrote a piece about capital punishment, about Timothy McVeigh. It was the first federal execution in my generation. I’m from a state that doesn’t have the death penalty. So it was the first time that, clearly, I was one of those people they’re talking about: When “we the people” are killing McVeigh, I was one of them. This was my federal government killing this man.

I don’t know the answer to whether I’m for or against it; that answer is not available to me at the moment. But I do know that if it’s being done in my name, I should be there for it—or at least be allowed to watch it on TV. And the fact that they had prohibited that specifically was, to me, offensive. So I wrote about that.

Greta Van what’s-her-name, and Sean Hannity, they were all calling to see if I’d go on, and I said, “I don’t think so.” The letters to the editor were interesting, the ongoing conversation about it at the time. The same with the piece on reproductive choices—oftentimes, I’ll meet someone who has some vexation about that. And that’s good. I like that. I think we should vex each other. But I’ve never had a bad experience, I’ve never had an “I wish I hadn’t done that”—one of those moments.

With poems, I have. I once wrote a poem about a former spouse that was one of those poems that would have been better off tucked away and found among papers. That said, there was a therapy in it—in a very selfish way. But it was needlessly hurtful. I’d like to think I’ve evolved past that.

WEIDERT

Do you write poems that you know in advance will get tucked away?

LYNCH

I try to avoid those.

WEIDERT

You try to avoid writing them?

LYNCH

I try to write, period. And I think poetry is as good an axe as a pillow. You should be able to cut with it if you want to. But I do want to avoid hurting people inadvertently. I don’t mind hurting people I intend to hurt—but inadvertent damage is the thing I fear. And I think all writers are capable of it. You’re dealing with powerful tools, you know; words are powerful business. I’m not saying you should be guided by fear, but I think general kindness is still a better thing. It’s just evolution. We want to be better people.

MARK CUILLA

You deal with feminist themes in your poetry and nonfiction. Do you consider yourself a feminist?

LYNCH

I’d say humanist. I’ve read a fair amount of feminist literature, and I was a single parent for a long time, which I think, for men, makes them feminists.

One of the boxes you have to fill in on a death certificate is, “Usual occupation,” and the next one is, “Type of business or industry”—funeral director, mortuary, writer, that type of thing. For years, I would often have a son or daughter or a surviving husband say, “She was just a housewife.” And I can remember, after being the single custodial parent for years, thinking: You do it for a week and come back and tell me “just a.” Because the effort to minimize the hardest work I’ve ever done was offensive. I can only imagine what it would mean to a woman who had done it all her life.

All the women in my life have been powerful, powerful women with strong medicine—dangerous people. Every one of them. Some of them still are. My sisters are dangerous people. And my wife is a lovely, lovely person, but she’s a powerful person. I just don’t see them in any way, shape, or form as having ever traded on victim status. What’s irksome to me about so much of the third-wave feminism of the day is that it did seem to traffic in victim status. I remember being in Edinburgh one year for the book festival, and I was rooming near Andrea Dworkin in this beautiful hotel in Belgrave Circle. I’d read just enough of her to know I wanted to meet her and talk to her and have a little go-round with her, you know. I sent her a note asking for that. I put it in her mailbox and got no response. I then saw her in one of the tents in Charlotte Square, where they do the festival. I said, “Possibly you didn’t get my note, but I’d be very, very honored if I could take you for a cup of tea or coffee.”

“I won’t have time,” she said.

I came away from that exchange thinking, Well, go piss up a rope. I did feel bad when she died. She was a much misunderstood person. Like most of us, our own worst enemies.

CUILLA

Can you talk about the intersections between nonfiction and poetry?

LYNCH

I think that any kind of writing just depends on reading poetry. I can’t imagine ever wanting to write anything at all if I hadn’t first been completely smitten by poetry. I can’t exactly tell you what it was I was smitten by, or when, or what it was that I read. I keep having to pour the shit in because I can’t remember any of it, except bits and pieces. It’s really exciting when you come across a poem that just lights up the room. For me, it’s the thing without which nothing else would happen.

I think the poet—the fictionist, the nonfictionist—is trying to disappear in the words. I once commissioned a painting of the island off the coast of our house in Ireland. I said to my son, “I want a painting of Murray’s Island. Could you paint one to hang over the mantelpiece? I’ll give you enough money to make it worth your while.”

He set to work doing it and he’s out there, and he’s a perfectionist in all things and he was really getting agitated by this commission, you know. “What do you want?” he says.

And I said, “I want it to be unmistakably a Sean Lynch, and I want it to be unmistakably Murray’s Island.”

And he says, “Then I’ll have to disappear.”

And I said, “Well, you’ve got it. That’s exactly right.”

So it was one of those things where you would look at it and it’s unmistakably Murray’s Island, but it has his fingerprints all over it. And I think it’s the same with writing poems. Who it is that we’re writing, or what version of yourself you channel is sort of random, really. You can take on different voices. Nonfictionists do it, too, I think. Some days you come to play, some days you come to pray. It just comes to who shuffles in on the first sentence. And sometimes it shifts in the middle of it. What starts out as sort of basic expository writing becomes self-revelation. We don’t know how that happens but if done deftly it really does seem seamless.

It’s Montaigne who says that “In every man is the whole of man’s estate.” Just start concentrating on something. Write about your toilet habits, what you had for dinner. What’s that thing they always say when they’re testing you for a microphone? Tell us what you had for breakfast. I’d love to start an essay with what I had for breakfast and see where it went, just for the heck of it.

CUILLA

Much of your poetry clearly comes from the personal. Richard Hugo writes in The Triggering Town that “You owe reality nothing, and the truth about your feelings everything.” Does this hold true for your work?

LYNCH

Ah. Well, the way you frame the pairing, yeah. Things don’t have to be true in a—I mean, I’m not here to tell you all there is about how it was for me this morning, but there’s something truthful about my keeping a record of it. And then you recognize something in yourself or something that’s generally true of all of us.

When writing doesn’t work for me it’s because somebody sets out and they are too self-enamored. And I think this is where James Frey got in trouble. It’s not so much that he was lying; it’s that he was trying to puff himself up. He was telling us lies about his experience not for the sake of some other truth, but in the service of him—his own sort of heroic self.

And heroes are tiresome ideas today. They really are. Because a hero always knows the end. They’re going to win, or they’re going to save the day and save the world. Essayists don’t know the end. And poets don’t.

I think Hugo’s saying that the truth is, we’re muddling through. We’re going with the best of it. That’s the truth of it today; we don’t know the outcome of this. At least for poets and nonfictionists, this is the excitement, this is the “essaying” of it, this is the setting forth. Not that there isn’t some bravery, but there are no heroics. It does take faith that the language will do its part if you do your part. The word itself is good that way—all of the etymological roots of “essay” are really good there.

WEIDERT

You deal with religion and religious issues in your work, but your examination seems to change from The Undertaking, through Bodies in Motion, to Booking Passage, which deals much more explicitly with your own issues with religion. Could you talk about that evolution?

LYNCH

The longest piece in Booking Passage is an effort to make sense of religious experience as a part of faith experience. With that whole piece about the church, it was handy to have a priest in the family and to have his pilgrimage and his sense of calling to work with as sort of the anchor for that piece.

I think we are trying to find ourselves in relation to whatever the hell is out there. Maybe the relationship between myself and whomever is in charge here is changing as time goes on. The first essay in The Undertaking was written in 1987 because Gordon Lish said, “If you write this, I’ll publish it in a very important literary magazine that I edit,” by which he meant that there would be no pay. But it really was the first time my nonfiction was commissioned. And between 1987 and 2004, when I was writing the last of that book, one would hope that, as Muhammad Ali says, “We are different people.” If not, there’s something very wrong. And my relationship with religiosity is changing a little bit over time, too.

John McGahern, a fictionist I really admire, died in the spring of 2007. He had been sort of banned by the church in Ireland as a young writer. He had a brother or a cousin who was a priest, I think. Large Irish-Catholic family, orthodox upbringing. He had every reason to feel thrown out of the church and abandoned by the church, and his books were banned and censored, et cetera. Anyway, when he died, I was impressed by the fact that his instructions were to have them do the Requiem Mass and nothing more. He didn’t want any eulogies, or opinions, or any of the sort of post-Vatican II add-ons. He just wanted the old words. And that’s true—and maybe this returns to your question about poetry and essaying—that there is a ritual part of it. There is sort of an artifice to it all, sort of a structural beauty to it. I’m still trying to figure out how it works. I’m glad you noticed some change.

I was on a panel a couple of weeks ago at a synagogue, called, “The Same but Different.” They took the title from me. There were hospice people and social workers and clergy, and I was to give the keynote speech about funeral customs and bereavement and how we respond to death—that type of thing. The lunchtime panel was a rabbi, a priest, a pastor, and an imam. And one of the questions from the audience was, “Does religion ever get in the way of people?”

They all gave predictable answers until the imam said, “There is no trouble with Islam. Muslims, however, are troublesome.”

And I thought, Isn’t it just so? I haven’t any trouble with Catholicism or Christianity, but Catholics, myself included—and particularly the reverend clergy—can really put me through spasms of doubt and wonder. And here’s the difference: I have come to think of them as articles of faith, as something that the life of faith requires us to doubt and wonder and ask and mistrust and think it over and ask again. And to check into the book-making. We are people of the book, so we should check into all the acknowledgement pages, the tables of contents and all that stuff to see where they were first attributed. Because I think those boys got together and figured out a way to change some of the text.

And this is where I’m a feminist. The sooner they put women in charge, the better off we’d be. I mean really. I was four-square in favor of women in the military, but for the wrong reasons. I thought that it would reduce our appetite for war as soon as women started being killed. It hasn’t. And more’s the pity. When I was a much younger man, I said, “Instead of sending the young men out to do violence to each other for the sake of old men, which is how it’s always worked, send women out to do kindnesses—to old men.” [Laughs.] And there will be no war. Now, that’s probably not a feminist thought, but it could work no worse than what we’ve got going now.

IVERSON

In your essay, “Y2Kat,” you state repeatedly that writing is not therapy. However, in Bodies in Motion, you talk about writing in a way that makes it seem like a saving grace. Do you think writing is edifying?

LYNCH

Tell me about “edifying”—the word, “to edify.” Tell me what you make of that word.

IVERSON

Redemptive, maybe.

LYNCH

Yes. I love the idea of redemption from it. I do think—and here, I defer to Mr. Rogers—that if you can name the feeling, you can sort of keep track of it. What was Mr. Rogers always saying? “Name that feeling?” Hugo goes on to the same thing. Tell us the truth about that feeling, not the heroic stance, where it doesn’t bother me, but the stance that says, “That sucks and it hurts,” or, “That makes me want to strangle whatever.” Tell the truth about that. Yes, that can be redemptive.

And what’s more is that it brings around it a community of people who feel the same way or may someday be in the same predicament. That’s precisely why we read, isn’t it? To find out that we’re not crazy or are at least crazy in defensible ways, that other people have exactly these same responses. Hugo was right about that.

CUILLA

In Still Life in Milford, you quote, as an epigraph to the first section, an art exhibition guide that reads, “Subject matter is less important than personal vision, based at once on a physical intimacy with, and a metaphysical distance from the real world.” How does this relate to your work?

LYNCH

I stole that from the museum in London. They were having an exhibit with still life. The second epigraph contradicts it, doesn’t it? The first one says exactly what you’ve recorded, and I stole it from the Hayward Gallery in London, where I was at this exhibit. And the second one says, “It is difficult to make moral or intellectual claims from the arrangement of fruit or vegetables on a table”—which is what Still Life in Milford is. My point was, I was trying to make some moral and intellectual claims for just that. I don’t know about this first one. I can’t remember, now, what drew me to that—I’m sure it was the notions of physical intimacy with, and metaphysical distance from, the real world. I’m always drawn to the notion of the body in things—the corpus.

Part of my professional life has been marked by the disappearance of corpses in the funeral ceremony. Our culture is the first in a couple generations that attempts to have funerals with no bodies. We just disappear them. If you read the death notices in the paper today, you’ll notice that most of them are going to involve some type of memorial event, sans body, sans corpse. Also, most likely, without sort of the gloomy stuff that comes along with having a corpse in the room. But the way to deal with mortality is by dealing with the mortals. And you deal with death, the big notion, by dealing with the dead thing. And this you can try at home: Go kill a cat—see how you get through it.

Really, that story about the cat, “Y2Kat,” has it right, up to the part before the cat’s going to be dead. But after the cat died, the truth of it is that the way my son figured out how to deal with the cat’s death was by burying the cat.

We’re very good when it comes to cats and dogs. We just don’t have a clue when it comes to our people. We have them disappeared without any rubric or witnesses or anything like that. And then we plan these, “Celebrations of Life,” the operative words du jour. These celebrations are notable for the fact that everybody’s welcome but the dead guy. This, to me, is offensive and I think perilous for our species. So, in Still Life, one of the things I was trying to say is, Yeah, there is an intellectual—an artistic and moral—case that can be made for not only fruit and flowers in a bowl on a table, but also a dead body in a box.

CUILLA

There’s a series of sonnets in Still Life, and several sonnets in Skating with Heather Grace, and, at the end of Booking Passage, you write about your early work in forms. How much are forms still influencing your work?

LYNCH

They’re very handy for me. I love them, and form has changed a lot. I think one of the last poems in this new book is called “Refusing, at 52, to Write Sonnets.” I was younger then. It was a fifteen-line poem; I just miscounted. [Laughs.] Literally. And I’ve been writing sin-eater poems. Somehow, this guy turned up again. He’s been around since the first book of poems I wrote, and he’s always going to appear in twenty-four line apparitions because the first one was twenty-four lines, so having that form helps.

But form is such an open thing. There’s a poet, my dear friend Michael Heffernan. I probably would not write anything had I not met Michael Heffernan. Certainly, I wouldn’t have written books if I hadn’t met Michael Heffernan. Over the years of our correspondence, we’ve gotten to the point where we only correspond in poems; because we’re both old and cranky, we piss each other off, we’re both recovering alcoholics—you know, just land mines everywhere. We write poems back and forth and we seem to get along very, very well. So the form of the day is, I have to respond to what he says. He sends a poem called “Purple.” I send back one called “Red.” There’s the form. All it has to have is red in it. I write one called “Euclid goes to Breakfast with the Old Farts,” and he writes me back something Euclidian. So the form is very, very free flowing.

But having a task, which is the form itself—this is what I want to say about this, and I meant to say it when you asked about poetry: I think poets made up sonnets and sestinas and pantoums, and all those other epic forms because nobody was asking them to write poems. People could care less. So the poets thought, Look, I’ll give myself work to do. If I could jump through this hoop, surely they’ll be impressed. And they set off to write these different forms so people would say, “Oh, that’s very clever.” But they were making themselves do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

And this is the hard part about essaying and poetry—that you’re setting out to do something you wouldn’t otherwise do and you have no direction; it seems like chaos. And when you finally figure it out, and when you finally get it right, it’s just joyous when it’s done. That’s true of poetry and essaying. When you make that leap across a paragraph or over a stanza, and the reader goes with you and you really land it, then you think, Ah, I’ve done something that’s never been done before.

I always tell my students that it’s very much like crossing water. And it is. You’ve got to give readers some sort of standing stones to grab onto. But if you make it too easy, they’ll get bored and fall in and drown. If you don’t give them any stones, they’ll say, “No, I’m not going there with you.” But if you can space those stones just perfectly, so that they can leap with you, when they get to the end they’ll say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Sooner or later, they think they did think of that, and then they write something new. That’s how it works.

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Dorianne Laux is the author of four books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Facts about the Moon (Norton, 2005), was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She recently published a chapbook called Superman: The Chapbook, and co-wrote, with Kim Addonizio, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasure of Writing Poetry.

Laux says of her poems, “It’s really important to me for people to understand what it is that I’m trying to say. On the other hand, I don’t want to write simple poems. I want to give people something really meaty to chew on.” Her poems balance the complexities of life with an understanding of the emotions of ordinary people. In her poem, “Facts about the Moon,” she writes, “The moon is backing away from us / an inch and a half a year. / That means if you’re like me / and were born around fifty years ago / the moon was a full six feet closer to the earth. / What ‘s a person supposed to do?”

Born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952, Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a BA in English from Mills College in 1988. She is known for poems of personal witness and for writing about everyday experiences. A review in the American Poetry Review referred to her book, Awake, as “Gutsy in its use of daily practice, daily grief and joy. Dorianne Laux’s Awake is one of the best first books I have ever read. These are poems of remark­ able maturity.”

Awards for her work include a Pushcart Prize, an Editor’s Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Awake was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry and her second book, What We Carry, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Laux has taught at the University of Oregon, and now lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teaches at North Carolina State University. We met at the Spokane Club where Laux peeled an orange and discussed pop culture, jazz, and the beautiful arches built by termites.

TANA YOUNG

It seems that much of your work is autobiographical. Am I correct in reading it this way?

DORIANNE LAUX

I’m a poet of personal witness. I know there’s a lot of feeling out there that the “I” is dead and the reader is a void, but I feel I’m talking to somebody. I don’t know who it is, but I’m talking to them, and I’m telling them about my experience of being alive, hoping that experience somehow translates or touches someone else’s experience of being alive. So yeah, it’s almost all autobiographical. There are moments when I shift things, and of course memory is faulty. And then on top of that, you’re translating what you feel in your heart and your guts and spirit, trying to translate those things into language, which is already an impossible task. It’s all a pastiche, but it’s true to my experience—as true as I can make it.

YOUNG

There’s a contrast between the idyllic sense in the poems you’ve written about your child and the difficulties described in the poems about your own childhood . What do these poems tell us about your journey?

LAUX

I came from a dysfunctional family as many of us do. My experience is not that different from anyone’s, it’s just that people don’t tend to talk about it because it’s embarrassing, or shameful, or complicated. Too complicated. Like somebody innocently asks, “Hey, do you visit your parents?” Well, it’s just too complicated. So I might say, “Sure, yeah, it’s fine. I have a wonderful relationship with my parents,” or my siblings, or whatever.

My parents’ generation wanted things to be economically better for their children. They worked hard to ensure that their children didn’t have to work as hard as they did. I think my task was not so much to make things economically better for my child, although that was certainly a goal. But I was also trying to make things emotionally and spiritually better for my child. And they were. So it’s still that American concept with a different slant, or a different set of goals. I wanted her to have a childhood that was free of all that. Of course, I didn’t protect her completely, and she didn’t have an idyllic childhood. You know, bad things happen all the time no matter how hard you try.

One might look at those poems and think, Well, this is what it’s like to have been a mother to this child. It was like that, and this poem is representative of this child’s life or this relationship between mother and child. And in fact, it’s one moment that’s been captured. I have yet to capture other moments, maybe, that aren’t as idyllic.

To me, poems in some ways are wishes. They’re asking us to look at what our best possible situation could be, so that we have an actual visual or aural representation of what we can work toward. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s like that. It means that we wish it to be like that, and so if we can somehow make that alive in language, we can actually make it alive in reality.

SHIRA RICHMAN

In your latest book, Superman: The Chapbook, you seem to be playing with the intersection of the ideal and reality. How did you choose to publish a chapbook at this point in your career?

LAUX

Well, it was wonderful in the way it came about because Joe [Millar] and I went to visit Redwing, Minnesota, where they have an artist colony called Anderson Center for the Arts, and on the grounds they have Red Dragonfly Press. Joe and I would go over every day to watch this wonderful guy, Scott King, work at his small press, and he has a couple, maybe three of these old, falling apart, beautiful, antique printing presses. He’s one of the few people in the United States who still makes type, actually forges the type, you know, casts it with metal.

We were just fascinated. We’d go over and watch him casting type and the hot metal pouring down through this little funnel and the letters coming out and he’s cutting them. We were hanging around all the time, bothering him. How do you do this? And how do you do that? So one day, he asked us if we would like to make a broadside. He said, “You can actually set the type yourself if you like.”

We went over and started setting the type, which was nor as easy as it sounds. There’s this big box with all the letters set up in this counterintuitive way, all the most used letters on the outside, and the least used letters on the inside. And so we’re trying to find the A and the L and also trying to make sure that the M and the N don’t get mixed up. We’d set the type, and then make an experimental plate of it and realize we had all the letters backwards and upside down. We’d have to start over. It took us hours and hours and hours to get these two little broadsides. The broadside I made was of “Hummingbird,” which is from Facts About the Moon.

After we made the broadsides, Scott asked me if I’d like to do a chapbook. He had created chapbooks for authors like Barry Lopez and W S. Merwin. He enjoys making these fine-press, beautiful little things and he wanted to know if I had a group of poems that I thought might work well together. And I said, “Sure.” So we worked on that for a while—he did all the work on it. I didn’t do any more typesetting.

Those are new poems, and it’s somewhat common for a writer to put together a chapbook of new poems that you wouldn’t get anywhere else, and the small press makes some money. All those poems will be in my next full collection, but they’ll be published in the chapbook first.

RICHMAN

Are the poems about pop stars indicative of a general direction in which your work is moving?

LAUX

Those poems were really influenced by reading people like Denise Duhamel, Tony Hoagland, these kinds of pop poems about popular culture. Among my poet friends, I’m the one they come to when they want to know about popular culture. They’re like, “Who is Bono?” [ Laughs.] Many poets, they’re just not hip to all this—”What’s Survivor?”—and I can tell them. “What’s Facebook, MySpace?” I know all this stuff. I don’t know why. I’m just a junkie for popular culture, and when I was growing up in San Diego, I loved all the popular music of the day.

So I thought, Why shouldn’t I write about these people I know? I grew up with Cher. I feel like I know her intimately. Why wouldn’t I write a poem about her? And Superman; I feel really embarrassed for how much I love Superman. No joke. When a Superman movie comes out, man, I’m right there. I want to see it. Of course I know that Superman is absolutely ridiculous. This whole idea of America—he’s going to save the world—it’s romance at its highest pitch. Yet there’s something moving about it, something very stirring about Superman. I’m not sure if this is where the bulk of the work is headed, but the poems were fun to write and will flavor the new book for sure.

YOUNG

Those poems feel like coming of age pieces to me. They take me back to the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, to those summers.

LAUX

Those were good days. They were also terrible days. Of course Superman is not Superman in that poem. He’s Superman with cancer, and he’s smoking dope, and he’s trying to stop the pain in his head, knowing he can’t save the world. He breaks my heart in that poem. But that’s how I see the United States in some ways, too. He’s representative of this culture, which is sick. It’s an interesting way to get to some material. Pop culture can influence art on a deep level. If you read somebody like Denise Duhamel or Tony Hoagland, you realize there’s something deeper going on underneath that surface. When you think about popular culture, you think immediately of surface. But what’s underneath? Like the whole idea of the Beatles breaking up, and what that public and highly contested division meant to a generation.

TERRANCE OWENS

You’re known for writing about ordinary people, but these pop culture references seem to go against that in a way, though they also connect ordinary with not-ordinary people—

LAUX

Well, Superman is as not-ordinary as you can get, and yet I make him an ordinary man. The same with Cher, who’s this huge diva-idol, but in my poem, she’s just a woman getting Botox treatments. So yes, I am dealing with a patently not-ordinary person, but I’m taking my vision and applying it to her. And of course, Cher is ordinary. If she weren’t ordinary, she wouldn’t be influenced by a culture that tells her she’s not beautiful. She’s scared. She doesn’t want to get old. She doesn’t want to lose her attractiveness, her sexuality. That’s what all of us are facing.

RICHMAN

David Wojahn said he thinks Americans have difficulty allowing the personal and the political to intersect, and that’s why there aren’t a lot of successful American political poets. What are your thoughts about that?

LAUX

I do think it’s difficult. Our definition of the political is complex. We think of politics as being what’s going on, for instance, in Iraq right now, or what’s going on in the government, or some issue like feminism, or something that we can put in a little box and say, “Here’s the issue, and here’s the person talking about the issue.” However, any time you ask readers to consider their lives, in any aspect, in any way, to consider their relationships to their children, to their lovers, their husbands or wives, to their jobs, to money, to power, whatever, you’re asking them to stop and think. That’s a political act, especially right now in America.

We’re having a hard time stopping and thinking. We’re having difficulty recognizing what makes us human beings. That we’re on the earth for a very short time. That life is precious. That death is on the doorstep—that’s a huge thing. You’re asking people to stop making widgets for a minute or two and consider what role they’re playing, not only in their lives, but on the large stage. Any art that’s political stops people in their tracks for a moment and asks us to consider.

So it depends on how you want to define political, and I think my poems are political in the way that I just spoke of. But it’s also true, more and more, I think, that they’re moving into a larger arena. On the other hand, I am not an overtly politicized person. I certainly have my ideas about things—and how I vote, how I move through my life has political implications, but I’m not, quote, a political poet.

In some ways, I think poets tend to be apolitical, because we are so open to possibilities, which makes it difficult to come down on one side or another. We see the complexities of things, so it’s difficult for us to say yes or no. We’re dealing with stuff that’s somewhere between yes and no.

If you said, “Do you think it’s right to kill people?” I would say, “No, absolutely not.” On the other hand, I suppose there are situations in which I’d have to reconsider that statement, while many people wouldn’t. They’re firmly on one side or the other. So is that political? I don’t know. In some ways you’re in Hamlet territory. To be or nor to be. You’re going to be asking yourself that question for the rest of your life. There are no real answers, and we know that. And poetry is a way of allowing a human being to live between those two ideas and feelings for a little while.

YOUNG

This reminds me of the encounter you describe in “S. Sgt. Metz,” in which you get to the person underneath the camouflage.

LAUX

The uniform, yeah, you could see that man in front of you and say, “Oh my God, what is this guy doing going to war? What an idiot. I hate everything about him, everything he stands for.” Or you could be on the other side of things, and say, “Look at this brave young man.” Both of those positions are simplistic ways to look at the human being standing there, trying to do the right thing, and you’re looking at him really trying to see who he is.

As an artist, I looked at him and thought, This is the perfect specimen of a male human being. The idea of him torn apart on the streets of Iraq was horrifying. To think of this beautiful human body, perfect in every way, put in front of bombs and gunfire was just unfathomable.

Maybe he’ll get through, you know? That’s the other thing, he’s a real person in the world. I never spoke to him. I just observed him, and I saw him talking to an older woman who was standing in front of him, jostling her bags, and he helped her. I could see that he was intelligent, kind, graceful. He was this human being living his life and that life was going to possibly be cut short for reasons I can’t fathom, and I don’t know if any of us can.

Humans are absolutely fascinating creatures to me, and I so much want to represent them in their dignity. We’re capable of miraculous things, and on the other hand, we are cruel, horrible, just horrible. I’m infuriated by humans and absolutely awestruck at the same time. We’re such fallible, fragile creatures. And this takes me back to my youth during the Vietnam War when I was saying, “The war is wrong. I’m burning these letters. I hate you. How could you do this?” It took me living for thirty or forty years to look at my brother and realize that was my brother I was hating. How could I have a brother who was killing people? How could I sleep with a boyfriend who was killing women and children? I was too young to recognize certain complexities that I’m now able to recognize. When I was younger, I thought, Oh, this is right and this is wrong. Now I realize I don’t know what right and wrong is. All I know is that human beings are gorgeous and worth preserving.

RICHMAN

Hearing you talk about Sergeant Metz makes me think of your poem, “Teaching Poetry with Pictures.” Why wasn’t that included in Awake?

LAUX

I know. Why wasn’t it? My editor didn’t like it. He said he just didn’t like it, so it stayed out. And now it’s gotten so old that I’ve never thought to put it in a book. I’d forgotten it until you mentioned it right now. I’ve written a number of poems that have ended up in anthologies or magazines but that never made it into a book.

There’s a little poem I wrote that was on the Portland buses called “Romance,” and it’s only a five- or six-line poem. I really like it, but it’s never made it into a book. It just hasn’t fit somehow. These poems are just sort of out there, but they’re not completely lost. You found one of them. Maybe it will make its way into a book someday. Who knows? Maybe somebody who has more time or interest or patience than I do will gather them.

OWENS

You said in an interview that “First lines are often important when determining the rhythm structure of a poem.” What’s the spark that first allows the rhythms to come in?

LAUX

It’s like music. When you listen to Glen [Moore], who plays jazz, and who I love to read with, he’ll just take a line, a piece of music, a musical phrase, and start playing with it. It’s basically—this won’t be worthy of an interview because you can’t transcribe it into the text, but it could be something like [hum s a jazz riff]. That would be the phrase, and then he goes [hums contrapuntal jazz riff]. And then you take that phrase and you start playing with it. That’s American jazz, the one thing we export that’s beautiful. Most of what we export is not so beautiful, mostly violent movies and fast food. But jazz is something we can be proud of. Now we take any rhythmic phrase and play with it.

That said, I do have a few rhymed poems. “Life is Beautiful” is an example:

Life is beautiful and remote, and useful
if only to itself. Take the fly, angel
of the ordinary house, laying its bright
eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out
delicately along a crust of buttered toast.
Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest
dump where other flies have gathered, singing
over stained newsprint and reeking
fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate
ballet above the clashing pirouettes
of heavy machinery. They hum with life.

I can hear the music that I’m playing with, and the lines are approximately syllabic—between eight and twelve syllables per line, somewhat dactylic—beautiful, delicate, intricate. It’s also a rhymed poem: Useful/angel, out/toast, singing/reeking, intricate/pirouettes, and it’s end rhymed—all the way through, ending on “disorder,” and “gorgeous.” Not perfect rhyme, but good enough for rock ‘n’ roll. The poem posits a question: Maybe there are too many of us, and yet the other side is that we’re “gorged, engorging, and gorgeous”. Yes, maybe there are too many of us, but on the other hand, isn’t it beautiful? [Laughs.] Stuck between yes and no.

I grew up in a musical family. My mother played piano, so I was inundated on a daily basis with music. She would play everything from Beethoven, Bach, classical music to pop songs to musicals. She’d play from The Music Man, South Pacific, whatever the popular musicals were at the time. Also, I’d come home from school and say, “I heard this new Sonny and Cher song,” or, “I heard this Beatles song,” and she’d listen to it, pick it out on the piano, and play it for me. She could play anything. And everyone in my family ended up being musical, except me. I try to put it into my poetry.

RICHMAN

How did that happen?

LAUX

When I was first born, my mother divorced my father and went to California. She was a struggling, single mother and finally met my stepfather and was scared of having kids. When I was coming up, she played, but they couldn’t afford a piano. Later, she managed to get one and she started teaching the children. Well, I had already gotten past the rhyme of being taught piano. So, my sister after me, my sister after my brother, all of my brothers and sister’s kids play. I did play guitar, but I dropped it after a little bit and went to poetry. I think I took all that musical training into my ear. I could recognize a musical phrase and see how it could be played with to make it interesting.

That’s one of the things I start with. “Life is Beautiful.” I hear that word phrase as music. I love reading aloud because, to me, it’s like playing an instrument. All the phrasing is like singing. I feel like I’m singing; I’m just not singing. [Laughs.] But it feels like singing to me.

YOUNG

There’s a point at which one goes from being a student poet to a master poet. When you write, are you still pulling from a mysterious place?

LAUX

Probably 90 percent of what any artist does is practice. We practice and we fail and we fail. You set your pen to the page every day, and of course, you’re hoping that something grand will happen. But the chances are slim, and you know that going in, but you go in anyway. That’s faith. You keep hitting the page, hoping that something’s going to fire, something’s going to happen, something’s going to bloom out of it. And the more you practice, the more that possibility of success is present. The more you do anything, the greater the possibility that something might actually come of it. So you constantly live with failure, and yet, you know that that failure is teaching you something.

B. F. Skinner discovered this thing, intermittent reinforcement, where you can reward somebody at random intervals. It might be the third time, and the next time it’ll be the twenty-fifth time, and the next time it’ll be the first time, and the next time it’ll be the eighty-seventh time. You can’t know when the reward is going to arrive, but that’s what keeps you going. It’s going to come sometime. And that’s all I care about. I don’t care if it comes the hundred and fiftieth time as long as it comes, and it’s a very powerful thing. Any time you happen upon a poem, your spirit, your entire body, is filled with this energy of that magic that has happened, and you’ll do anything to get back to it. You’ll do anything to find it again.

I don’t worry anymore about writing. There are times that I go through dry periods. I never go through a block. I’m always writing, but there are times where I’m just not on my game, and I’ll use that time to read some new poets, go see some art, walk down to the river and just stare at it, or have a conversation with my sister, or whatever—do whatever it is that I do in my life, hoping that I’ll get filled up enough. And something will happen, some juggling will happen and boom.

Ellen Bryant Voigt has a great essay in her book The Flexible Lyric. I can’t really write about poetry. Some people are wonderful at it, like Ellen Bryant Voigt. I get lost writing about poetry. But she writes these wonderful essays, and in one of them she talks about termites—I think it is—how some people were studying termites. And they put them in a kind of aquarium with all their stuff they use to build these beautiful arches that make nests—dung and wood chips and whatever it is that they use. And she said the termites run around chaotically for a long time, and they have little pieces of this stuff in their mouths. Ultimately, one termite will accidentally drop a piece and another termite will drop another piece on top of it. And once that happens, they all get excited and run over and pick up chips and start making the arches.

When that happens, they all get alert and they’ll say, “Okay, it’s time to make an arch.” And I think that’s a wonderful metaphor for how we make poetry. We’re just running around in these chaotic circles with dung in our mouths, or wood chips, or whatever. And we drop something and then something else and suddenly this arch starts to appear. We really don’t know how it works. I think Ellen’s essay comes closest to describing how a poem happens.

It’s just this odd coupling of sound and image; our minds are so filled with chaos. Our bodies are filled with it, our emotions, our spirits are just chaotically running around, saying, “What, what? What, what, what, what, what?” And then something happens, and things start to make sense for a moment. Of course that’s all that it is, a moment, the moment of making the poem—and the moment of getting everything into its order is a beautiful, ideal moment. Then you go back to chaos, hoping for that moment again .

OWENS

That’s a good metaphor for jazz, too.

LAUX

Absolutely; that’s what jazz musicians are doing—riffing off a phrase, hoping that things will come together and build an arch of some sort. Of course an arch is a beautiful metaphor, right? There are termites on both sides, building their columns and they meet in the middle. And so you can think of that too as the reader and the writer. They’re coming together in the middle and touching.

YOUNG

Are there people you read that help get you in a state of mind for writing?

LAUX

Reading other poets is often what will spark my imagination. I’ll see one of their arches and get inspired. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll write a brilliant poem; it just means I’m inspired. It has to be both inspiration and something else that happens. I reread the poets I teach: Phil Levine, Ruth Stone, Sharon Olds, Li-Young Lee, Carolyn Forché, Lucia Perillo, Gerald Stern, Lucille Clifton, C. K. Williams, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marie Howe and Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland, another good essayist. Too many to list, but you get the idea. I love poetry that feels as it thinks. I’ve been memorizing Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Assault.” Those poems inspire me.

But lots of things inspire me. Travel—I’m really looking forward to moving to North Carolina, because it’s going to be a whole new landscape, a whole new culture, a history that I’m completely unfamiliar with, new people. All of this change is wonderful for a writer because you’re shaken out of your habitual responses.

We all get habituated, right? You get up in the morning, have your coffee, and read your newspaper, and that’s great. Everybody loves life in its mundane, daily aspects. It’s what makes us feel secure. But I also start to go numb a little bit and I don’t see what’s around me. So I put myself in a new situation and suddenly I’m really seeing the person next to me, hearing music, and I’m smelling, and I can’t help but want to write it down.

YOUNG

Do you have a particular time that you write every day?

LAUX

Some people are very disciplined, but everybody has their own way of approaching their art, and for me, because I started my writing life as a single mother and while working as a waitress, it wasn’t like I had an office and time every day that I could sit down and write. Life was too chaotic. So I got it when I could. When my daughter was off at school, I’d write. Sitting on the bench waiting for her to come out, I’d write. I’d be doing an errand, and I’d pull over to the side of the road, pick up a Jack in the Box bag, and write something on it. That’s how I managed to get poems written—in between times. I’ve continued doing that.

Whenever it strikes me, I sit down and write. Of course now I’m in a university, so I have all summer to write, which I never had when I was coming up as a poet. I have that time, and my body does sort of click in when spring comes. I can feel my body going, It’s getting to be writing time. Yeah. It does kind of get into these seasonal responses. Joe and I are going to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for five weeks this summer, and we’ll write every day.

I’m hoping I can start putting the new poems together and making them into a book. I need concentrated time to do that. I can write the poems between times, but doing the revision work—that’s the hard part. When you’re at a writers’ colony, you get up in the morning, have your breakfast knowing you have hours to write before lunch, and more hours after lunch and before dinner, and you can get a lot of work done. But most of the time, you’re just squeezing it in, and that’s fine with me. I’m happy sitting at a bus stop and writing a poem.

RICHMAN

Or at the airport.

LAUX

Yes, I started that Metz poem at the airport. I got halfway through it and my plane was called. I went down to Santa Cruz with my friend Ellen Bass and stayed for a couple of weeks. Ellen gave me an exercise. She said, “I want you to use these words, and these phrases.” So I went back to the Metz poem and used the exercise to help finish it, and I used all the words she’d given me. I’m grateful that I can write anywhere.

RICHMAN

Your attraction to capturing moments, is that why you don’t write fiction?

LAUX

I love people and psychology. I love stories, dialogue, relationships, description, everything that goes into making a story. But I also love compression and music. And of course our best prose writers do, too, but I’m much more interested in moments. I love reading novels and short stories, but as a writer, I’m not so interested in Fred getting from the living room into the car. I couldn’t care less. I want to go inside Fred’s soul and play there. Not that fiction writers don’t do that as well, but they’ve got all these other concerns. And I’m much more interested in the psychological moment , the moment of epiphany. I want brush strokes versus whatever is the opposite of brush strokes, which I don’t think there is an opposite. But that’s what I want to do. I just want those light feathery things.

But back to practical circumstances: I only had these moments in time to write because I had a child. I had to get the dishes done. I had to get the rag out, and the mop. I was writing in these tiny spaces and it’s difficult to write a novel like that. You could, but it wasn’t something that I had a whole lot of time for, so poetry was a great form. I could use all this stuff: dialogue, arc, character, description, and I could use it all in a very small space within a limited amount of time. While my daughter was at school, I could do this. Poetry was a practical issue for me. I could do a draft of the poem and then go off and come back and play with it a little bit and go away and come back. But more than practical, it was the fact that I loved sound. And fiction, novels, prose at its best does have that sound, but it’s a rare novel that ‘s musically beautiful throughout. It’s more often getting information out: And then she went to the store and picked up some oranges and a gun. It’s moving things along on a plot level, and I’m not so interested in plot. Reading plots, yes, but not writing them.

OWENS

You seem interested in meeting your readers in the middle, not making them walk across the whole bridge themselves—

LAUX

I grew up as a navy brat in San Diego, living in Quonset huts with bunches of other kids from all over the world, and those kids couldn’t care less about reading the back of a cereal box, let alone a book of poetry. Those are the people of my life. Those are the people I want to speak to, the people I grew up with, ran around in the canyons with. It’s really important to me for them to understand what it is I’m trying to say. On the other hand, I don’t want to write simplistic poems. I want to give those people something to chew on. And that’s a fine line, writing a poem that’s accessible, and yet has the complexity you feel it needs to be a true work of art. So yeah, I want to meet my reader, and I want mystery, but not misery, not where they’re throwing up their hands and saying, “What is this? I can’t understand it. What the hell’s going on here?” It may be out of fashion, maybe even a bit radical these days, but I feel strongly about being understood.

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Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Mark Childress comes from a southern family and grew up in Ohio, Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Though he continues to move every four or five years, it is because he writes about the South, Childress says, that he is identified as a southern writer and often placed alongside Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, and Truman Capote. “On the one hand, it’s a kind of ghettoization,” he says. “On the other hand, it’s a really nice ghetto.”

Childress is the author of six novels, including Tender, a Literary Guild selection; Crazy in Alabama, published in eleven languages and named the [London] Spectator’s “Book of the Year” (1993); and his most recent, One Mississippi, of which Ann Lamott says, “Mark Childress is at the top of his form.” He has also written three children’s picture books, and his articles and reviews appear in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Times of London, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other national and international publications. His awards include the Thomas Wolfe Award, the University of Alabama’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Alabama Library Association’s Writer of the Year.

After graduating from the University of Alabama, Childress worked as a journalist for ten years, until he eventually decided to focus all of his time on his own writing. He currently calls New York City home, where he is working on his seventh novel. We talked with him over coffee at Café Dolce in Spokane.

Rachel Kartz

One Mississippi takes place in the South, in the seventies, and explores the heightened racial conflict caused by the desegregation of public schools. In an earlier interview, you said you were in the South at this time but weren’t old enough to participate. Were you worried, when writing One Mississippi or Crazy in Alabama, about getting it right or possibly offending somebody with your take on these things?

Mark Childress

No, because what I’m trying to write is fiction. So I felt like as long as I was true to the spirit of the time and what happened then, and as long as I was honest in the way that fiction is honest, it’d be fine. It’s hard to say that a pack of lies, which is what a novel is, can be honest. But I truly believe that, in a lot of ways, fiction is more true than nonfiction because you can get inside people’s heads and tell what they really think. You can’t do that in nonfiction.

As a journalist I used to be frustrated that I couldn’t get people to say what their motivation was for something, even when I knew what their motivation was. People protect themselves. Novelists go right through that, to the heart of what characters really think.

Certain people criticized Crazy in Alabama because there’s a theory in civil rights literature that white people have to be the hero, that black people should never be the hero of their own narrative. This is the self-justified southern white way of saying, “We were really the good people.” I could never consider for a moment that Peejoe was the hero of the book. In fact, there’s a point where Peejoe says, “I’m not the hero.” His telling on the stand that the sheriff killed the boy is the one heroic thing he does, but it happens very late in the book. So, I didn’t set him up as a hero. I wanted a character that white people would be sympathetic to, a character that approached the racial conflict—see, to my mind, the sheriff is a human too. And he’s dealing with the forces of history pushing in the direction that he had to go. And I wanted to present the racial question in all of its subtlety. It’s not black and white. It’s all shades of gray. Just like every question.

Kartz

How much research do you conduct when writing about historical facts or people?

Childress

It depends. Tender was very much a novel of Elvis Presley. So, before writing that book, before I wrote one word of it, I read every book ever written about him, listened to every piece of music he ever made, which is a lot. I went to Graceland and worked as a tour guide. I toured all the homes where he lived, tracked down the addresses just to see what the settings were like. Then I started writing the book and I threw some of that away, changed things as I wanted to, because I wrote it as a novel. So, for that book, the research was critical. But I haven’t done research like that for any other book.

With V for Victor, I did go back and do a little research. Usually, I’ll write a first draft and look at the history of it and see what I need to check. Then I go back and maybe do some research, and change it on a subsequent draft. I don’t tend to do that much. One Mississippi was a different set of circumstances and actions, but a setting very much like the high school that I attended. I knew exactly what that library looked like, what the hallways smelled like, and what the cafeteria looked like. That’s pretty much just lifted from my life—the setting—though all the events are fictional.

Neal Peters

When writing about politically volatile material, like Peejoe’s experience in Crazy in Alabama, do you have a message you’re trying to deliver?

Childress

I think it was Louis B. Mayer who said, “If you want to send a message, send a telegram.” I really don’t think of my books as having messages when I’m writing them. When I go back and look at a book, I can say, “Okay, I suppose you could draw the lesson of A or B.” But when I’m writing a book, I’m actually just in the act of figuring out what happens, what people are going to do, and what they say, and trying to make it as interesting and dramatic as I can. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stop and think if you’re sending the right message, but I think those reflections, like whether or not I was excusing white guilt, those are all things that arrive after you’ve published the book––those are critical reactions to the book. It’s not your concern when you’re writing it. You’re just trying to be true to the book’s internal rules.

Within Peejoe’s world, he doesn’t think of himself as a hero. The civil rights movement is set up as a story of villains and heroes. And there’s no room for gray areas—the media doesn’t describe gray areas—you’re either good or you’re bad. And so they chose which side he would be on. To me, one of the most interesting characters in that book is Uncle Dove. He’s much more like most people were in the South. He knows that racism and segregation are wrong, but he thinks it’s just too big for one man to change and it’s never going to change, so you have to kind of go with the flow and be kind to people as far as you can. And that explains what a lot of white southerners went through at the time.

The thing a lot of people miss, that I tried to explore in that book, is how close black and white people were before integration. Almost all white households had a black person working in the household. Even relatively poor families would have “help,” so the contact was a lot closer than it is now. In some ways, our society down there was more integrated than it is now. Not the public accommodations, not the pools and the restaurants and things like that, but everybody was in contact with everybody else. On a person-to-person basis, there wasn’t a lot of hatred. But there was a lot of interest on the white side of perpetuating the system that kept black people down.

Peters

Crazy in Alabama is written in varied points of view. Chapters alternate between Peejoe’s first-person point of view and Lucille’s third- person. Can you talk about the opportunities and limitations of using multiple points of view?

Childress

The thing I liked about opposing those points of view was that I wanted the story to have kind of a dark side and a light side and to go back and forth between the two. At times, Peejoe’s becomes the light story and Lucille’s becomes the dark story—they change places a few times. But I like a sense in the book that, Oh man, that was a heavy scene and Taylor’s dead, and that’s terrible, or, Okay we can relax because Lucille’s having a good time in Vegas. I like books that make you cry and laugh and that go back and forth between those extremes. I love John Irving’s books because he always does that. At the happiest moment in the book, you’re almost dreading what’s going to happen next, because you know it’s not all going to turn out to be so happy. And that’s so much more like real life than a story that’s all dark, or a story that’s all comedy. I kind of like that, giving the reader that sucker-punch, where it’s like I’m distracting the reader with something funny and then snap, something tragic happens. It happens that way in life. I like those contradictions and complexities.

As I get older my writing tends more toward linguistic simplicity, but more complexity of the narrative, if that makes sense. I think my style has become plainer on the page, and that’s been an intentional thing I’ve worked toward. A World Made of Fire is written in iambic pentameter—it’s extremely layered, there’s a lot of difficult dialect in it, and it’s a very challenging, “literary” kind of novel. At the time, I thought that was sort of the mark of art—to make something challenging and difficult and dense and layered and all that. I began to realize—and a lot of writers have written on this—that the harder thing to write is the simple sentence that expresses complexity. Or a story that’s accessible to a general reader yet has every layer of meaning of a literary novel. To me, that’s a bigger challenge, so it’s the kind of thing I like to take on because it’s the kind of book I like to read. You know, where the narrative grabs you and pulls you through. Dickens is somebody we study, but he’s also incredibly enjoyable to read. That’s the dividing line between the kind of books I like and the kind of books I don’t like—a book with a narrative that hooks me and drags me through it, and at the end, I go, Wow, I didn’t know that was going to happen. I love that effect in a book.

Kartz

What’s the difference between genre and literary fiction?

Childress

It keeps changing every year. When I was in college, it was the time of the metafictionalists and experimentalists, and Barth and Barthelme and Gass were the heroes of the teachers I had. Vonnegut. And these people were writing anti-novels and were all about subverting the form, changing the form, doing experiments and things like that. I didn’t respond to those kinds of writers. I read them and did my papers and discussed them, but I always preferred strong narrative. I was an addict for Dickens and books that have things that happen in them and things that change and people who are different by the end. It’s a strong narrative that draws me through.

That’s why I was so turned on by the Latin Americans. I discovered Marquez and Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes and all these great writers who were just as besotted with narrative as I was. Some of those books brought narrative back into fashion in North America. You can almost trace it. After One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mark Helprin wrote Winter’s Tale—which was a huge hit and was sort of a literary fabulist novel, a magic-realist novel set in New York—that sort of opened a lot of people’s eyes. They said, “Oh my God, we don’t have to write pinched little exercises in mental masturbation”—which is what some of that metafiction was to me. You can read every word of a Gass book and by the end of it, you may have learned something, but you haven’t felt anything. I like fiction that makes you feel.

That said though, the whole idea of genre, I mean, the idea of a “literary detective novel” didn’t exist twenty-five years ago. But even the great masters used to write them. Conrad wrote them. Twain wrote his. We got very uptight in the sixties and seventies about, you know, this is art, and this is commerce. And a book can’t be good if it’s popular. That’s as much crap as saying a book can’t be good if it’s unpopular. Popularity is no determinant of quality.

It also has a lot to do with shifting fashions. Narrative was not in style twenty-five years ago, and now it is. Now, oftentimes, you have books that have very strong narratives and are extremely popular. These two things used to be, could be, synonymous. But there was a kind of anti-commerce movement in the art. You know, Let’s throw out anyone who’s popular. And I’m glad to be part of the wave that’s brought it back the other way.

Peters

How do you think literary fashion will change in the near future?

Childress

I have no idea. Everyone in publishing has been predicting the end of publishing since I entered it twenty-five years ago, yet there are a lot more books being published and sold now than there were then. Everyone thought that the death of the independent bookstore would kill fiction and literature in America. The opposite has actually been true. I hate it as much as anybody––the death of the little independent bookstores in New York where I live. Now, all we have in our neighborhood is a Barnes & Noble. But on the other hand, in a typical small city in Alabama, there are now two Barnes & Noble stores with more books than that city had access to before. In a lot of small towns around the country, that’s replicated. In a Barnes & Noble, you have over five hundred thousand titles for sale. Before, maybe you had a mom and pop shop with six thousand titles. I’m sorry for ma and pa, but the people of that city now have an excellent bookstore. I kind of see it as a two-edged sword.

That said, the cell phone novel is coming from Japan. Have you heard of this? This is the rage now––they sell millions. They’re written to be read on cell phones. The modern generation––the ADD, caffeinated generation––will they have the attention span to read an eight hundred page novel? Seems to me enough of them will. Look at the list of bestselling literary fiction, fantastic books that are selling widely today. Everyone’s worried about the death of the physical book with these e-readers and Kindles from Amazon. I still say that until you can go to sleep on the thing, throw it across the room in a fit of rage, or tear a page out to write a grocery list, then regular books are going to survive. I still like to physically hold a book.

Peters

In your opinion, who is the best writer, or what is the best work of fiction, in the last twenty-five years?

Childress

Oh, wow, that’s an impossible question because literature is not a beauty contest. There’s not one person whose vision is better than everyone else’s. There’s a tendency, especially in America, to try to single out what’s the “best.” I have particular writers and particular genres that I go to over and over again. But I don’t rank them that way.

It’s very easy for me to say To Kill a Mockingbird is my favorite book because I was born in that town and it gives people something to talk about. But To Kill a Mockingbird was really my favorite book when I was thirteen or ten when I read it first. I haven’t read it in a long time so it’s not currently my favorite book. But, that said, I currently have a particular obsession with Latin American writers. I think Gabriel Garcia Marquez is probably one of the great writers of our time. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a seminal book for me that I go back to over and over again. You see Marquez’s footprints all over Gone for Good.

Usually, frankly, when I’m writing fiction, which is most of the time, I don’t read much fiction, because I tend to mimic what I read in my writing. I like to hear the way things sound. So if I’m reading a book by Jayne Anne Phillips, then the next page I write is somehow going to sound like Jayne Anne Phillips. Usually when I’m trying to write fiction, I read nonfiction or history or current events, then I save up novels. Then, when I’m in between writing, I’ll read a whole bunch of them at once.

Kartz

You were talking last night about Crazy in Alabama being a historical novel. What’s your definition of a historical novel?

Childress

A historical novel is a novel that takes place in the past, in which the fact that it takes place in the past is somehow central to it. I was telling the anecdote about the movie executive who said, “Yeah, I know it’s a civil rights story, but does it have to be period? Couldn’t we move it to today?” Because that would’ve cut the budget. And no, it couldn’t. Because the central concern of Crazy in Alabama is desegregation and the moment when desegregation actually happened in the little towns. When I wrote that book, I felt that there hadn’t been a novel that dealt specifically with that moment. Everyone thinks To Kill a Mockingbird is a civil rights novel, but it’s a novel about the thirties, way before the civil rights movement started, and at the end of the book, black people are no better off than they were at the beginning.

When I was a kid, that was that moment of demarcation. I remember very specifically coming back to the town where my grandmother’s house was. The year before we had swum all summer in the brand new swimming pool that had just been built. We came back the next year and they had filled it with blacktop. There was the diving board and the ladders that we used to get into the water and, one year after they built it, they had filled it with blacktop rather than let black people swim in it. I was seven years old that summer and that had a mighty big impression on me. It still doesn’t make any sense to me. That story was repeated all over the South that summer, because the public accommodations law was passed. Swimming pools were ruled public accommodations, so instead of letting black people swim, they just closed the pools. As a matter of fact, when we were scouting for the movie, we saw ten or fifteen pools that were still relics of that time. No one had ever swum in them again.

Peters

You move around a lot, never staying in one place for more than a few years, and yet, in some of your books—especially Crazy in Alabama—you explore social complexities against a backdrop of strong community ties. Do you, as a transient citizen, ever feel isolated from the communities you live in?

Childress

Absolutely. And I think in some way that may be why I move—to become a stranger again. That’s very much following the pattern that my family had when I grew up. My father had a job that transferred us every few years. It was like being in the army. We hated it as children, because we always had to leave our friends, and we were always the new guys in school, and just when things would be going good, you’d pick up and move and have to start all over again. But then, as adults, the three of us brothers have continued to move. Four or five years into a place and we say, “Well, I feel a little itchy now, it’s time to move on.” I think also that estrangement from the community is sort of what you seek as a writer. When you go to a place for the first time, you see things that people who have been living there for twenty years don’t see. It’s all new to you, the smells and the sounds and the kind of food and the way people talk. I still remember when I first moved to New York. It all seemed very powerful and exhausting and loud and busy and crowded. And now it’s just home. Trying to sleep without sirens going and garbage trucks at four in the morning, I’m like, I need some noise, it’s too quiet. When I start feeling too much at home in a place, then it’s time for me to leave. I think as I get older maybe that’s going to settle down. But, I don’t know, I haven’t seen much indication of that.

Kartz

Even though you keep moving, most of your books take place in the South. And you identify yourself as a southern writer—

Childress

I don’t identify myself as that, but everyone identifies me as that because most of the books I’ve written take place in the South. I come from a southern family. I’ve said being southern is like a virus––you carry it with you wherever you go. Just because you’re in Indiana doesn’t mean you’re not southern; it just means you go to the black side of town to find turnip greens. We carried our little southern household wherever we went, anywhere in the country. If I were from Kansas I’d probably be writing obsessively about Kansas. I wrote Gone for Good, which has nothing to do with the South, but its hero is a southerner, from Alabama and Louisiana. I just think of it as my country––my people—and that’s who I write about.

Actually, when I started, except for Truman Capote and Harper Lee, there really weren’t many fiction writers from Alabama. And now there are several really good younger writers coming up from there. I don’t think I had any effect on that, it’s just a generational thing. Living through the civil rights movement had a big impact not just on me but on the generation after me, the people who were younger than I was when it was going on. It continues to resonate. In the beginning, I felt like I was writing about a part of the country that no one else was writing about, because Truman Capote wasn’t writing about it anymore, and Harper Lee wasn’t. So I felt like it was my little territory. Now there are conferences on Alabama writing. That’s weird. That’s a new development in the last twenty-five years.

Peters

What does it mean to be a southern writer now?

Childress

A lot of times it means there’s a separate section in the bookstore, where they kind of ghettoize you—put you over to the side. African- American and gay and southern writing, these are ghettoized sometimes.

That’s the reason a lot of writers resist the label. If you come from the South, which is the most distinctive part of the country, you know you’re different. And the literature of the South is a different set of books than the literature of New York or California. But it’s kind of funny that nobody has conferences on midwestern writing and, in the South, there’s a conference every week on the question of, “Are we becoming too much like the rest of the country?” On the one hand, it’s a kind of ghettoization. On the other hand, it’s a really nice ghetto. Faulkner’s there, Harper Lee’s there, Flannery O’Connor’s there, Eudora Welty is there. Toni Morrison I count as a southern writer. Alice Walker’s there, Zora Neal Hurston. So, if you’re going to put me in a ghetto, I’ll take that ghetto. And I understand. Our culture’s all about subdividing us into little groups and trying to find which niche we fit in. Nobody ever considered Hemingway a Michigan writer, but if he were publishing now, he’d be considered some kind of provincial.

Kartz

You completed your undergraduate degree at the University of Alabama, but you didn’t pursue an MFA. Can you talk about the benefits and the drawbacks of not being in an MFA program?

Childress

The community I got into was journalism. I went to work for newspapers and magazines right out of school. For the next ten or twelve years, while I was writing my fiction at home, I was very much in a writing community—it was just a different kind of writing that we were doing. I feel like I wrote a million words for newspapers before I ever published a word of fiction. And I think each sentence I wrote—even if it was about a Gardendale city council meeting—was teaching me how to write. I do believe that writing is a combination of gift and craft, but I feel like practice makes you better. I think that I was a much better writer after ten years of working on deadlines and having to pump out whatever the editors told me to go cover that day. It took the ego out of the writing. You can’t have ego about your writing in a newspaper. You have a deadline. If you don’t turn the story in on time, you get fired. And that’s really motivating—to learn to sit in the chair and write.

I think sometimes in academia, inspiration is overplayed––that we have to find that moment for the muse to strike us. Well, bullshit. If you wait for the muse to strike you in the publishing business, you’re fired. Just because you’re a writer doesn’t mean you don’t have a certain duty to do your work.

The one thing about MFA programs, and that I regret I didn’t do, is read a lot. I mean I was reading, of course, all the time, but not in the way you do for school. When not in school, you tend to read more of what you like and you don’t always take on things that challenge you or that you feel are good for you. I needed to pay the bills some way and I thought that being a working writer was probably going to help me as much as doing fiction workshops. I had done four years of them at Alabama and they were great, but I kind of felt I had gotten all the juice out of them.

Kartz

You said in an interview that often your characters are much more in control of the story than you are. Nabokov said, “That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as quills. My characters are galley slaves.”

Childress

[Laughs.] Good for him.

Kartz

How do you reconcile these two statements?

Childress

Well, I didn’t make the Nabokov statement, so I don’t have to reconcile that. [Laughs.] He’s a hero of mine, and a brilliant writer, and I will guarantee you that when he started Lolita he didn’t know everything that was going to happen. Now, he would tell you that he made that happen and that he told those characters what to do. But I’d bet that, at some point, those characters became alive in his mind and were speaking dialogue to him––because that’s what they do.

When you really know a character, you know how he or she would say everything they might want to say. It’s kind of a semantic argument to say the characters did it. Of course, the characters are creations of your mind, so actually, your mind did it. I think it’s just a question of imagination. If you imagine the people to be real and you imagine them for long enough––an intense enough period of time––you come to know those imaginary people as real. And then they start doing things that you didn’t necessarily tell them to do. Now you have to give them permission to do those things. Maybe that’s what Nabokov was saying: they’re his galley slaves. If they took him in a direction he didn’t want to go, he would stop, go back and cut what he had just written and go off in another direction. So he’s definitely the captain of the ship, but I think those galley slaves sometimes grabbed hold of the rudder and steered him in a direction he didn’t think he was going.

Kartz

Regarding “Good Country People,” Flannery O’Connor said that when the wooden leg was stolen, she hadn’t known the character was going to do that, but in the end it was inevitable. Do you align more with that statement?

Childress

In my experience of writing, yes. But of course, I’m not Nabokov, so I can’t know what was going on in his head and the psychological somersaults he flipped to achieve what he put onto the page. But that sensation of Flannery’s is, to me, the sensation that I want––that sensation when I come to a moment in the story where something happens that I didn’t expect… and it seems perfect. That, to me, is the unconscious working through fiction. Some part of you prepared for that moment, but to the conscious part of your mind, it was not what you thought was going to happen.

In One Mississippi, I was about 180 pages into the first draft when I realized what was going to happen at the end. I’d had no idea. But when I went back and looked at the beginning, all the clues were already there. From the very first time you meet Tim, there’s something unsettling about him, something dark. I don’t know why I put that in there, but when I realized what was going to happen I stopped for about a month and said, I don’t want to write a book that ends with a school shooting. That was not what I had started to write. But that was what the characters did.

I don’t know if Flannery’s right or if Vlad is right, I just know that at that point, as hard as I tried to steer the galley slaves in another direction, they wanted to go where they wanted to go and I followed them. It’s a glorious moment when you’re writing a book and you reach that point where you feel like it’s telling you what’s going to happen. The story begins to write itself. That’s the moment where the writing becomes fun—instead of gutting it out to see what the hell you’re trying to do, which is what most of it’s like.

Kartz

The only two homosexuals in the novel––Tim and Eddie––kill themselves. Are you worried about the commentary this is making on homosexuality or homosexuality in the ’70s?

Childress

There were a couple others in there but you never quite realized who they were. For instance, if you read very carefully, the note that Tim left––it turns out that the guy he was at the rest stop with was Red. And there are a couple of other closeted characters that you have to go back and find for yourself. I understand that Tim and Eddie both commit suicide, and, I guess, in a way that’s a commentary on just how “nonexistent” homosexuality was in Mississippi in the 1970s.

There’s a wonderful memoir by Kevin Sessums, called Mississippi Sissy. He grew up the sissiest kid in some little Mississippi town. He went and had this whole gay life in Jackson in the ’70s, in the period of One Mississippi. I lived in Jackson in the ’70s, and, A: I didn’t know I was gay, B: I didn’t know any gay people, and C: I didn’t know there was a gay bar in Jackson, and I lived there. It was so completely closeted that unless you took that step you had no idea those people existed. It was a really different society, and I’ve read statistics that say, to this day, 30 to 40 percent of teenage suicides are closet homosexuals who can’t admit that they’re gay. And that’s now––when it’s so open. I didn’t set out or plan for those boys to meet that fate, but I think it was… God, if I tried to be out, in high school, in Mississippi? I probably would be dead in some way. I’d have either gotten killed or I’d have killed myself if I wasn’t able to pass as a “straight kid.” Some kids were just too sissy they couldn’t pass. A lot of them killed themselves or moved away.

I’ve definitely chosen, as an adult, to live in places that are a lot friendlier than that. I moved out of Alabama in 1987, and I’ve never lived there since, because I like to live in a freer place.

Tim, in One Mississippi, probably didn’t even know he was gay. Until, at some point, he had to admit to himself that A: he was, and B: he wasn’t going to change. I think that’s when he decided he’d just rather die. I hate the choice he made for himself.

Everyone says you can’t connect the gay experience with feminism, with civil rights, but it’s all the same thing—it’s all oppression and repression. I mean, you can’t pretend not to be a black person. That’s the only difference––everyone knows you are.

Peters

Crazy in Alabama later became a movie, for which you also wrote the screenplay. When you write a screenplay, what do you give up and what do you gain?

Childress

It’s a whole different medium and it was hard to learn how to do it. The studio sent me a box of scripts and the books they were based on. I spent two months reading the books and then the scripts. Some of them were great movies and some of them were really pulpy. I mean, how do you turn a Tom Clancy novel into The Hunt for Red October? I realized that the main thing you lose is like two-thirds of the story. Because if a movie’s as long as a novel, it’s going to be ten hours long. The first thing you start to think about is what to get rid of, what to throw out. And this is the reason that the book is almost always better than the movie—because the book is usually simply more than the movie. It’s more detailed, with more incidents––more complex, more subtle. If you made One Mississippi into a movie that had every flip and turn of the story, the thing would be twelve hours long and nobody would watch it.

So the first thing you have to do is stop being a novelist and become a screenwriter, which means you start looking for what you’re going to throw away. I had too many characters and too many stories going off in different directions. Then I had to look for the action that could be told in pictures. At the same time, as you’re losing a whole lot of story and you’re losing a whole lot of words, you’re gaining pictures. And so you can tell the whole story in a series of pictures.

There’s this scene in Crazy in Alabama I was proud of because I wrote it on the set like two days before we shot it. We were trying to look for a way to do that police riot at the swimming pool. A riot, by its very nature, is scattered. Something’s happening over here, and something over there. What is a visual image that could take us throughout it? And I came on the idea of focusing on the little brother of Taylor. You see him first. He’s watching the riot, then he climbs into the swimming pool and stretches out––the riot’s going on all around him. He’s just lying there, like Jesus lying in the water looking up. It said so much about the nobility of the soul of the people who were doing the protesting, and the evil going on around them. If you tried to describe that in a novel, it wouldn’t work. The words would just be spattering all around it. It’s such a simple image, that, to me, was the best moment of the movie because it was a visual distillation with no dialogue that in the book is seven pages.

I don’t know if you’ve read many film scripts, but they seem flat and the dialogue is very short. That’s because the actors and the set and the music and all this other stuff is added in to make it rich and full. That’s the hardest thing––to try to keep all that richness off the page of the script because that just distracts the director; he doesn’t need to know all that. He needs to know where they stand and what they say, and he’ll figure out the rest of it.

They’re both intriguing forms. I prefer the novel, because I get to be the director and the producer and the casting director; I don’t have to consult with anybody, and nobody can come in and cut my novel without my permission, or buy my characters. In a movie contract, they buy the right to your characters from now until the end of time—it’s stated—in any medium now existing or yet to be invented throughout the universe. And so I called my agent, and said, “I want Saturn. They can have all the other eight planets, but I’m hanging onto the Saturn rights.” He said, “That’s a deal killer.” I said, “Okay then forget it.” It’s ridiculous. They own your characters. So if they wanted to turn around and do “Crazy in Alabama 2,” and have Lucille become a black woman who moves to Detroit and works with Diana Ross—they have the perfect legal right to do it. In the novel world they can’t do that. I’m the author and I control it absolutely.

Kartz

You said once that when you’re writing novels, it’s like you’re seeing a film in your head—

Childress

We’re all poisoned by movies and television; we’ve had them since birth. I do tend to see scenes visually, and to see things in my mind, and then describe what I’m seeing in the scene. You have to use language that suggests all the senses. Not just what you see and hear, which is all a movie can do. In the book you can talk about how things taste, and how they smell and how they felt, and the temperature and all those things that are not accessible to a moviemaker. In the book, you can look at Lucille, and you can have your own picture in your mind of who she is. In a movie, it’s Melanie Griffith. So if you don’t like Melanie Griffith, you don’t like the movie. A book is a more universal thing, because your mind takes the place of all those other people that work on the movie. It fills in those gaps for you. That’s why one of the most exciting things to me is when a high school kid comes up and says, “God, it’s just like you’re a spy in our high school. That’s just what it’s like at our high school.” And then a seventy-year-old woman says, “Wow, that’s just like what it was like for me when I was in high school.” And you realize their experiences were completely different, but they projected their experiences onto yours and that’s got meaning that works for them. That’s the thing about fiction. That’s what fiction can do. I love that part.

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There is a kind of consensus among professional and amateur reviewers that Charles Baxter is a writer’s writer. Everyone says so. Baxter, who has called himself a “former poet,” is the author of five novels and four collections, including Believers, which he described to us as probably his best work. His novel The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000, and he has received National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation grants.

In an interview with the Atlantic, Baxter said, “I feel as if I’m in my family’s house when I’m writing short stories since I know where everything is. I know the logic of them so well.” But he didn’t publish a collection of stories until he was thirty-seven, in 1984. It was his first book of fiction and came on the heels of three failed attempts at novels. Baxter’s career is marked by this kind of persistence and flexibility and by a generosity that is evident in his teaching.

Unlike many writers employed at universities, Charles Baxter doesn’t complain about his day job. For many years he directed the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and he now teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he was born. He treats his teaching and mentoring of young writers as a natural extension of his vocation, and in the past twelve years he has published two exceptional books of essays on the craft of fiction, Burning Down the House (1997) and The Art of Subtext (2007). So the cumulative impact of Baxter’s work is—like that of the literary giants he cites: Stein, Brecht, Barthelme—more than the work of a prolific writer. It is the work of an artist, teacher, and scholar. We met with him at the Spokane Club during Spokane’s annual Get Lit! literary festival.

Samuel Ligon

In your writing about fiction, you talk about postmodernism and about Barthelme and about being enamored of postmodernism’s ethic or ideal. But you’re not a postmodernist writer.

Charles Baxter

No, but I once wanted to be. I wanted to be one of the writers who flies way up there and looks down at people like little dots on the map. That’s power: to think of people as little objects moving around on a chess board. That’s what a lot of postmodern writers do, though it seems unfair to Barthelme to say so. The characters don’t come to life; they have a kind of symbolic importance, but you don’t view them completely as human beings. They’re placeholders for certain ideas that the writer’s moving around.

Jonathan Frey

How’s that different from Kafka? You mentioned at your reading last night that you think Kafka is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Baxter

In Kafka you don’t even know what the system is. The characters are trying to figure out what they’re enmeshed in, and there’s an overflow of feeling—mostly claustrophobia, but it can be mixed with other emotions too. Kafka is down here with us, looking around, trying. His characters are always asking, “Where are we? What is this that I’ve gotten myself into?”

When I was trying to get my PhD diploma at Buffalo, I kept going to the registrar to find out if I was going to get my degree, the one on paper. And, though it’s a trivial example, I thought: Kafka was right about this. Every time you go to an airport, it feels as if it’s the Franz Kafka International Airport. You’ve seen that video thing in the Onion? The Franz Kafka International Airport? It’s fantastically funny.

But that’s fundamentally it: Kafka is always down here with us, and I don’t get that feeling with some of Pynchon, and I don’t get it with Gaddis or some of the others. They’re snobs, saying, “I’m looking down at this, and I’m telling you how all this works. Oh, and by the way, it’s all chaos, or it’s a system beyond our knowing. Did I forget to mention that?”

Ligon

But you use some of the structural devices that came into prominence in the time of the postmodernists—what somebody might call metafictional elements. I’m thinking of the structural devices in The Soul Thief and The Feast of Love.

Baxter

Right, that’s true. But in The Feast of Love, it just disappears. It functions as a frame, but by the time you’re on page thirty, it’s gone. I thought somebody opening that book and starting to read and seeing that there were these voices coming at them would say, “Where are these voices coming from? Who’s listening to these voices?” In The Decameron you have a similar structure of people telling each other stories, hiding from the plague. In The Canterbury Tales, they’re all on their way to Canterbury, so they’re telling each other stories. And I thought, I can’t just have these voices coming from out of nowhere. I have to have a reason for it. So there’s a guy with insomnia, he can’t sleep, he goes out to a city park in the middle of the night. And there’s somebody else there who’s got love trouble and can’t sleep, so he says, “All right, I’ll tell you my story.” And the insomniac writes it down, and that’s where the voices come from.

Frey

And the fact that the insomniac’s name is Charlie Baxter is just play?

Baxter

Yeah, it’s play. But we’re all used to that now. Philip Roth did it. It’s something we can play around with. It’s something we can do, and most readers won’t be shocked by it. Naive readers won’t like it. But it’s not all that new, this device; it’s as old as the hills.

Part II of Don Quixote begins with the false Quixote coming in. The first part of Don Quixote was such a success that another writer wrote The Further Adventures of Don Quixote, and, of course, Cervantes was outraged. So the false Quixote runs into the true Quixote, and so, to some degree, metafictional devices are as old as the novel. Writers never quite get over the pleasure of reminding their readers that it’s made up. That there’s an author behind it.

Frey

Is that related to Brecht? Or is it different?

Baxter

Brecht’s idea was that we spend so much time in capitalism, being taken in by the systems of commerce—newspapers, commercials, political advertisements—that it’s one of the tasks of art, to wake us up. To remind us that people are trying to sell us things. All the time. So, the alienation technique—as it’s called in Brecht’s term—is to make you aware of the techniques people are using to get you to think or do something in a certain way. My novel does keep reminding you that this is a novel. You are going to fall asleep into it. You are going to dream. And then I’m going to wake you up.

I think that we’re all conscious of the fact that when we enter a novel, we are going into a kind of dream, like Alice at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland reading a book and then getting drowsy and then going down the rabbit hole. Reading is like going down the rabbit hole.

A French critic said to me, “You Americans fall asleep more easily into fiction than we do.” There’s more of a rationalist tradition in France, he was saying, and they have a harder time falling into the dream of fiction than Americans do. I think his argument was that Americans fall into a dream world fairly easily.

Ligon

I hear what you’re saying about the dream, but it’s not dream logic that governs a novel. So how is that different? What kind of a dream is it?

Baxter

It’s half-waking. When you’re reading a book, these characters are in the scene and they’re talking to each other, and you’re reading it, and reconstructing something in your head in a twilight way. And if I write, “She walked in wearing a blue blouse, and a white skirt, and she had a red pin in her hair. And she turned to the right…,” you’re reconstructing this. You’re imagining it. You are reimagining it, and it’s not a dream, but you’re participating in the story, aren’t you?

Jane Smiley and I had an argument about this a few years ago in Houston. I was reading a paper about how faces are represented in fiction, and she raised her hand and said, “I don’t think you see anything when you read a book.” And I said, “No, I’m sorry. I do.” You say, “A woman wearing a blue blouse and a white skirt, wearing running shoes, came into the room,” I’m going to see her with…a frown on her face. I’m going to reconstruct her.

Ligon

Unlike Barthelme’s metafiction—like “The School”—yours is character-driven. I don’t think “The School” is a character-driven story. Much of his fiction asks us to reconsider how fiction works. What does drive “The School”? What is “The School” interested in?

Baxter

What drives a lot of Barthelme’s stories is the way that we’re caught in a world of representations. Everywhere you’re surrounded by representations that are taking us over. It’s like product placement has entered our lives. So Barthelme’s characters are always asking, “What am I doing here? What am I doing in this school? What am I doing in this house?” Barthelme’s always asking, “How did I end up here? Why am I in this world? Why am I wearing this Campbell’s Soup can illustration on my necktie?” Why? Because the representation of the soup can is going on in this world, and I guess it’s on my necktie.

What drives Barthelme is ideas—ideas and existential unhappiness. That’s what motivates Barthelme’s characters. They’re ill suited to live in the world. Barthelme always felt as if he wasn’t suited to life in the world. Not this world. That particular sadness animates his stories.

Melina Rutter

If you’re not a postmodernist, where do ideas fit into the process? For instance, in First Light, you use the ideas of astrophysics, and I’m wondering if you made a conscious decision to have those ideas inform, in some ways, the structure of the novel. Or if that just arose.

Baxter

It arose. Because the character I first imagined was Dorsey; I saw her pasting stars—little adhesive stars—on the ceiling of her bedroom. And I thought, Oh, she’s going to grow up to be an astrophysicist. Then I thought, That’s too bad for me. I don’t know anything about astrophysics. I had to go into research mode to find out about that. And then because that was what she was doing and researching, it made narrative sense for the book to go backwards in time. I could get this whole historical, cultural level into the book having to do with the atom bomb. In an odd way, physics was the grounding of that book and took you into a realm that was somewhat away from the family structure of Hugh and Dorsey together. It opened it up for me.

Rutter

I felt oriented when I was reading it, but I would think that there’s a risk involved with including such content.

Baxter

Fiction readers want to find out about stuff. You tell them, as Philip Roth did, how gloves are made, leather gloves. People love to find those things out. If you tell them something about the nature of astrophysics or even certain kinds of fireworks, readers love that. The factual basis has always been part of the novel: how you do something, where something came from. Nicholson Baker’s first novel, The Mezzanine, is full of this kind of material, and I wanted to give First Light a doubled kind of perspective.

But, at the same time, it’s a very emotional novel. The material facts, I hope, balance out the emotion, particularly Hugh’s idea of being lost in his own light. Dorsey has found her own light, but Hugh is married and has children. He’s one of these guys who was a jock in high school and was popular with girls, and then he marries and settles down, and he doesn’t know why this life hasn’t been as good for him as it was in high school. Once he becomes an adult, it’s a mystery. Dorsey had an unhappy life in high school. She’s one of those smart girls who frightens everybody, but she grows into her life, and she’s okay with it. For me, it’s very emotional. It’s soaked in feeling.

Frey

Why are so many of your books about love?

Baxter

For some people, it’s just not an important subject. It’s something that they take for granted, and it’s something that they can get past. It has not been something that I have ever been able to take for granted. My father died when I was a baby. My mother was unstable. I always knew where the next meal was coming from, but I developed what therapists call hypervigilance. The question of whom I would love and who would love me became almost a matter of life and death for me. Almost by necessity, given the nature of my early life, I got attuned, I got obsessed by it. When The Feast of Love came out, I made statements of this sort, and some readers said, “But this is not mature love in your novel.” Well, of course it isn’t. It’s not stable. The kind of love that’s portrayed in that book has to do with infatuation and instability, and that’s the reflection of somebody who has never found that landscape to be particularly stable.

Rutter

Brecht’s idea of the destruction of the fourth wall is theater theory. Can you talk about how theater has influenced the ways you think about writing and literary theory?

Baxter

One of the reasons theater has come into my thinking to such a degree is that I noticed that in the stories I was getting in my workshop, and actually, in some of the fiction written by contemporaries of mine, the stories are not particularly dramatic. As if drama were some kind of embarrassment. We can all talk about character; we can talk about setting; we can talk about dialogue; but if you begin to say, “Well this isn’t very dramatic,” it’s as if you farted, and you’ve said absolutely the wrong thing. But I think that we have to get back to the idea that, if people are going to read these books and stories, we have to consider the dramatic elements that underpin the great books. I noticed, some years ago, when my students at the University of Michigan were taking corollary classes, the ones who were taking acting classes often seemed to improve their writing by having gone through the techniques of learning characterization, and scene-building, and the structure of the play. So I began to read the work of my students and think, You know, this is under-staged. We don’t know where these bodies are in space. We don’t know whether they’re turning to or away from each other. Often it’s not even notated whether these people are listening to each other, whether they’re looking at each other, what they’re doing with their hands.

Now, it’s true you can overdirect. I know of one writer, a friend of mine who’s a very fastidious writer, but when you read her work, you’re getting too much of the line readings, and you’re getting too much of the tiny details. And you think, C’mon, get on with the story.

Focusing on that kind of minute detail only works when the psychological atmosphere gets really congested. If the couple is about to break up with each other and they’re meeting for coffee, everything they do becomes important. Like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” He’s trying to convince her to have an abortion, and she hates the way he’s doing that. So Hemingway pays attention to everything they do in that scene. I mean, you could put it right on stage. I don’t think that’s overdirected because the emotions are so thick. If they were just talking about whether they were going to get on the train or not, it’d be unbearable. There has to be something big in the scene, emotionally, for that kind of thing to work.

Ligon

The kind of dramatic action you’re talking about, that you see missing, is that plot?

Baxter

Yeah, it’s plot, and it’s getting a character out there performing an action that may result in bad outcomes. I don’t know about you, but I read fiction because I want to see bad stuff happening; I can’t get enough of it. I want to see people misbehaving and getting themselves into real trouble, serious trouble. That’s what I go to fiction for. That and the sentences and the sense that I’m learning something about people.

Rutter

Is the antagonist that you see missing always taking the form of a person, a villain?

Baxter

Oh, sure. You have an antagonist in you. I have one in me. We’re all self-divided. The antagonist within ourselves is that part of us that wants to indulge in an impulse of some kind that leads to various addictive behaviors. The antagonist can be located inside the self very nicely. I like it when it’s externalized, but it doesn’t have to be. When it’s externalized, it’s almost always easier to write because then the dramatic materials take over and you, the writer, don’t have to explain everything. And of course, an antagonist can be a force in the world.

Rutter

Like the capitalist system?

Baxter

Yeah, or fascism. Or militarism. Or environmentalism.

Greed is probably one of the most powerful emotions. I think it’s more powerful than lust, I really do. It makes lust look kind of innocent. They’re related, but lust dies and greed goes on until…forever it seems.

Ligon

In Burning Down the House, you say that you’re nostalgic, as a writer, for mindful villainy. What does that mean?

Baxter

In Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, there are two characters who are down on their luck and poor. Over here there’s a rich, beautiful young woman who’s dying, and the poor woman says to her boyfriend, “I know what you should do. You’re handsome; you should go over there, and you should woo her and get her money.” That’s mindful villainy. In a way it’s rational, and people are deliberately making choices that they know are not quite moral. Those sorts of situations have an overtone of melodrama to them, but they’re interesting because they reveal a lot about the way we behave.

In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, there’s a character who reads her stepdaughter’s diary, and thinks, I know I shouldn’t be doing this, but nothing’s going to stop me because I want to know what she’s thinking. Oh Jesus! Look what she’s thinking. Small things like that. You know, it’s often the small things: We violate somebody’s privacy. It’s really revelatory. You don’t have to run somebody over in the street to practice mindful villainy. It’s the small items that accumulate that are really interesting for the fiction writer.

We see less of it now, and I think there are two reasons. We have a form of self-righteousness that results in people thinking, Oh, I didn’t really do that. Or, The outcome was good, so I really didn’t do anything wrong. After all, if we tortured people and got information out of them to prevent more violence against us, it wasn’t really wrong, was it? And I think the other reason is that young people going through writing programs right now are largely decent people who are kind of bookish, and very observant. And so, we’re not used to action. We’re used to observing. It’s hard to get these mindful actors into our fiction because many of us are not like that.

This also goes to the question of plot. When you’re young, you don’t like the idea of plot because it seems to lead toward something that becomes inevitable after a while, and nobody likes the idea of inevitability when they’re young. You like the idea of everything being open to possibilities. It’s that progressive idea too: that things can always change. After a while you realize things can’t always change.

Frey

So, do we like inevitability more when we’re older?

Baxter

You come to accept it. You don’t like it. Trust me, you don’t like it.

Ligon

But we do like it in story. You’ve said that the sudden recognition of inevitability makes a piece beautiful.

Baxter

Yeah, but you don’t want the inevitability to be built into it and completely predictable. Sam Shepard said about his plays that what he really was striving for was a combination of surprise and inevitability, that the best plots bring you to that particular combination. You think, What a surprise! I should have seen it coming.

Ligon

O’Connor talked about that inevitability with “Good Country People.”

Baxter

Her stories are interesting in that way. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the story starts out when the grandmother says, “Look here in the paper. It says the Misfit has got himself loose.” Then the family gets in the car, and they’re headed out on the trip. And where are they? They’re near Toombsboro. They’re near Toombsboro! You can’t say you weren’t warned. Toombsboro, and the Misfit drives up in a hearse.

If you read all of Flannery O’Connor’s stories in a row, some of them can look as if….I mean, their plots are great. Somebody’s always being run over by a tractor, or having their legs stolen, or drowning in a river, or hanging themselves from a rafter in the attic. But after a while some of it does feel….

Ligon

Manipulated?

Baxter

I’m not saying.

Ligon

You wrote in Burning Down the House that the truth writers are after can be dramatic only if it has been forgotten first. That the story, in other words, pulls something contradictory and concealed out of its hiding place. How does forgetting or concealment create drama or drive fiction?

Baxter

Suppose Grandma is dying, and you have a scene in which she’s in bed and she’s dying. We have all read scenes like this. When she’s dying, certain events of a sort are happening to her, but it’s not dramatic until you bring up something important. So, in Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Grandma is dying, but actually what’s happening as she dies is that these layers are being peeled back. Suddenly she’s four years old again, and it’s a four-year-old who’s lying in bed, dying. She never stopped being the four-year-old she once was. She never stopped being the sixteen-year-old she once was. Those things are still inside of her. We all forget that, and Katherine Anne Porter reminds us, so that scene becomes interesting and dramatic. We’re all, to some degree, writing about things that are familiar to our readers, and what you have to do is find the off-kilter detail that makes it come alive again, the part that nobody else had noticed.

Frey

This kind of critical approach—talking about antagonists and plot and drama like you do in Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext—this isn’t the way we normally hear contemporary writers and critics talk about writing.

Baxter

What we’re talking about this morning are critical terms that academics are not especially interested in using. This is formalist criticism, and they would all say the discipline has gone past that.
In formalist criticism, you’re looking at a piece of fiction, and you’re asking what elements it has in it formally: how it’s shaped, how it’s put together, how that shaping—that form—contains the subject matter. So: form and subject matter and the way that they define each other. To a degree, as a writing teacher, I’m a formalist. I’ll ask, “How is this story shaped? To what degree is it made out of scenes, expository material, transitions? What seems to be its central trajectory? What are the subplots?” I mean, that’s all formalist.

Now, mostly, our cultural studies are in the wake of Foucault and French theory, but even that’s beginning to fade from the scene. The focus there—I can’t summarize Foucault—but the focus there is how literature is a form of cultural production that mirrors or duplicates power relationships, how literature is an arm of power that has been deployed in culture.

Frey

Where does formalist thinking fit into the writing process?

Baxter

You can’t think about these matters when you’re putting your draft together.

Ligon

You’ve said that, in the context of initial composition, the act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation. It sounds like you’re talking about mystery there. What does one consent to?

Baxter

The original act of writing, sitting down and trying to get a story or some characters on the page, is still to me a complete mystery. How it’s done. How I do it. How anybody else does it. The more I write, the more I think that everything you’ve done up to the point that you’re writing isn’t much help. You always start out in the dark. When you sit down and you start writing, you agree with yourself that you’re going to make mistakes, that you’re going to blunder your way through the damn thing, and you’re just going to give yourself a lot of permission to get it done any way you possibly can. The critical skills that you have, that all comes later.

When I’m writing I’m not thinking about anything. When I’m writing a first draft particularly, I’m not thinking anything but, Who are these people? What are they saying? What do they want? Where are they going? I don’t even ask, Why are they interesting to me? I just write them. I have a friend who read two of my recent stories and said, “Why are you writing about these unpleasant people?” And I said to him, “Because they interest me. I can’t help it who I’m interested in. If I’m interested in scumbags, those are the people I have to write about. I’m sorry if you don’t like it.”

Frey

It seems that young writers can become enamored of the initial creation, the mystery, that sort of unnamable aspect that you’re getting at. They’re enamored of that, and so they turn around and eschew formalism later in the process.

Baxter

When you’re a young writer and it’s going well in your first draft, it feels sacred; it feels holy; it feels like something that shouldn’t be interfered with. It’s hard to break through that and say, “Yes, I was in the zone, but I also made mistakes. So the first draft is not as effective, not as pointed, not as clear as it should be. I need to go back and fix it.” To the degree that young writers don’t like revision, it’s because that initial state feels so wonderful, as if nothing could possibly be wrong in the way it was coming out, given the way you felt about it. Which is why it’s a good idea to put it in the refrigerator, and then go back in a few days or weeks. You have to get away from the spell you cast over yourself.

You get some distance on it. Then if you go back and it’s still casting the same spell over you, that’s a good sign. You can start to muck around with it, but you have to pay attention to those moments where you think, You know, I’m a little bored. This scene is a little boring. I didn’t think it was boring when I first wrote it, but it seems boring now. That’s when it’s time to go to work.

Ligon

In Burning Down the House, you write that “When writers over-parent their characters, they understand them too quickly. Such characters aren’t contradictory or misfitted. The writer has decided what her story is about too early.” Why is it a problem to understand characters too quickly, to decide what a story is about too early?

Baxter

It makes the story over-determined and the character over- determined. Before very long, as a reader, you think, I know what this character’s going to do. It flattens the characters. You say, “Oh, Jaime, she’s the quiet one. She’s the one who always worries things.” So in the story all she does is sit in the corner and worry things. That’s understanding her too fast. It lessens the interest in the story. It’s not just over-parenting, it’s bad parenting, because it stereotypes your own children and turns them into flat characters.

Ligon

And what about understanding a story too early? Do you ever understand stories?

Baxter

We have undergraduates all the time who sit down and write stories, and they attempt to prove that this fraternity boy, Jake, is a cheap bastard who really doesn’t care about women. The story’s there to prove that point. Most writers go through a stage in which they write stories that are point-making. One of the best things to ever happen to me was that I gave one of my stories to a poet I know, and she drew an arrow to the opening paragraph, and said, “Too point-making.” Often you don’t see it when you’re doing it yourself.

Regarding my own stories, I don’t always understand them. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think, Well, this is about that particular subject, that particular trouble. But I don’t think so until I’m halfway or three quarters through the story. Sometimes I’ll come to the end of the story and think, What the fuck is that about? I don’t mind that feeling.

Frey

If formalism is beneficial not in initial drafting but revision, is Foucault valuable to writers ever?

Baxter

I think so. Foucault was always asking, “Who has the power here? How did he or she get it? How is he or she using it? And what bigger things does that person tell us about power in the culture?” The easy way to summarize this is by saying, “Do you think George W. Bush just happened to be this guy who was elected president, or was George W. Bush a symptom of something?” If we say George W. Bush was a symptom of something, then that sort of sends you in the direction of Foucault, who will say, “Yes, of course he was a symptom of something, and we need to talk about what. What is he a symptom of?”

Ligon

What was he a symptom of?

Baxter

Oh, let’s not go there. [Laughs.] For me they were the years of nightmare, his presidency. I was in France when he was elected and somebody interviewed me and said, “Oh, it makes no difference who the president of your country is.” And I said, “No, you’re wrong. This is a catastrophe.”

Rutter

How do you reconcile the reality of an individual being caught in a power structure with your idea of a victim narrative, where characters never take responsibility for anything?

Baxter

It’s irreconcilable. You can’t. I’m saying two contradictory things at once. And both of them are true, I believe. We’re individuals; we have agency; we can change things. That’s a politically progressive idea: Everybody can do something. Barthelme said, “There are always paths, if you can find them, there is always something to do.” I love that. I believe it’s true. I also believe that we are inside a vast system, and the system has tremendous power over us.

I went to the Republican convention in St. Paul last summer, and if you’ve never seen the machinery of the state—and I don’t mean the state of Minnesota, I mean “The State”—guys in riot gear and tear gas canisters and trucks. Guys on horseback with revolvers. I’m not naive, but I’d never seen it. I’d never seen guys look at me like that. It’s a reminder that you’re a speck of dust to them, a dangerous speck of dust, and they want to put you in your place—the dustbin.

I think all of us feel both things at one time or the other. Sometimes we think, This whole thing is too fucking big for me. There’s nothing I can do about it. At other times, we think, I’m going out there. I mean, politically, I’m going to do this. I can do this; I can do that. I believe that I am able to shape my life.

Going back to the victim narrative, certain political or economic systems are more likely to breed that narrative. Totalitarian systems do it. The great fiction of the Soviet era is largely about people caught up in the Soviet system. To the degree that state power makes itself obviously felt or corporate power makes itself felt, the victim narrative becomes visible. Catch-22 is a great novel of being caught up in a military command structure during war. Heller’s next novel, also a great novel, Something Happened, is about being caught up in a corporate structure. People are paying a lot of attention to Bolaño right now because he seems to be interested in the kinds of political structures that were arising in South America.

Rutter

Do you view your writing as a political act?

Baxter

Sometimes. Shadow Play was a very political book. The novella Believers is political. There are parts of Saul and Patsy that I believe are political in the sense that the book, in its second half, is about the problem of who will take care of the kids who are under-parented, whom no one has taken care of. What’s going to happen to these kids? That book is also about the political nature of grieving, and how important it is to grieve and not just react with violence. I thought that one of the things that happened to this country after 9/11 was that we went into attack mode without grieving first. That made its way into Saul and Patsy. I think that my work is political, maybe by implication, if not directly.

Frey

Last night you mentioned that your first three attempted novels were conceptual—avant-garde, you said—and that that was the problem. You said that the experiments of the avant-garde were fine at the time but they’re over now. So is that whole movement dead, or is there space for that kind of experimentation?

Baxter

There’s a book by a critic named Paul Mann, called Theory-death of the Avant-garde. His argument is that the avant-garde has suffered a theory death, that every time people talk about experiments now, they’re basically talking about modernist revival. The kinds of experiments that they do are no longer experiments. These experiments have already been done. Some of them have succeeded, others haven’t. This isn’t to say that there isn’t something new that you can do with a novel. There is always something new you can do. But that particular idea of the avant-garde, stretching say, from 1900, before the first world war, to Samuel Beckett and the sort of allied experiments and abstractionism in painting, I think that’s over. I think we’re in a post-avant-garde era. I don’t think you can do something to a text conceptually that somebody hasn’t already done.

Frey

So experimentation is sort of like a closed system that happened for a while and now it’s….

Baxter

So you’re Gertrude Stein, and it’s around 1914 and you’re interested in what happens if you free sequence structures from narrative necessity and some of the words from their word-locks. You sit down and you write Tender Buttons. And people are shocked. Actually, you can go into an undergraduate class today with Tender Buttons and the kids will still be shocked. That’s kind of great. And you can take William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch into an undergraduate class, and they’ll get upset. You can take Lolita in, and they’ll be upset.

But for those of us who have sort of tried to keep track of what’s happened, somebody comes along and says, “I’m going to write something experimental,” and it looks like Gertrude Stein. I just think that’s like redecorating this room in the form of art deco and saying, “This is contemporary.” It’s not contemporary; it’s art deco. So, I just don’t think that the forces that gave the avant-garde its particular energy, aesthetically, are there. And it’s partly of the nature of capitalism to absorb everything you can think of and use it to its own purposes.

Ligon

What forces were driving the avant-garde?

Baxter

In the early part of the century it had everything to do with the freeing of words from sequence structures and what we took to be their obligations to meaning, in the same way that figurative painting gave way to non-figurative painting ideas of what the picture plane is. It also had to do with freeing narratives from actions and events.

The last section of Tender Buttons begins, “Act so that there is no use in a center.” And then it goes off into this giant coda. Stein concludes that with “all of this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.”

“To know to know to love her so. Four saints prepare for saints. It makes it well fish. Four saints, it makes it well fish. Four saints prepare for saints it makes it well well fish it makes it well fish prepare for saints. In narrative prepare for saints. Prepare for saints.” Which is from Four Saints in Three Acts. It’s great. It’s music, and it has nothing to do with
fish. Well, maybe it does.

Ligon

And it has nothing to do with rational meaning?

Baxter

No, it comes to you in some other way. The last time I taught Four Saints in Three Acts, I had two kids in the class who were in a relationship, and they were painting the apartment they lived in. Over the weekend, he would sit on the floor reading Four Saints in Three Acts to her while she was painting, and then she got tired and she would sit on the floor and read Four Saints to him. It’s like the radio going in the background. It’s really nice to have words used like that. It’s a release from “John came into the room pointing a gun at Maria.” You get tired of shit like that. You want to hear something like Gertrude Stein. “For a long time being one being living, he was trying to be certain whether he had been wrong in doing what he was doing. And when he couldn’t”—this is Matisse, “The Portrait of Matisse”—“and when he could not come to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing, when he could not absolutely come to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing, then he knew he was a great one. And he certainly was a great one.”

I love it. I just love it. But she did it. She did it and it’s kind of unreproduceable.

Ligon

Is she saying to release yourself from the rational coating of the language?

Baxter

Yes. Yes.

Ligon

And one can still do that….

Baxter

But it’s not an experiment anymore. We’ve got it. It’s ours. You can do anything with it that you want to. Gertrude Stein has started to be incorporated the way that all the other great writers of the past have been incorporated. I used a lot of Stein in The Soul Thief, and I used her in that story called “Winter Journey.” The ending is right out of Stein. I couldn’t go on my whole life writing like that. But I’m so glad she happened. She’s like this crazy aunt who gives you things.

Rutter

How do your teaching and writing inform each other?

Baxter

I think they feed into each other. I don’t think that I would teach books in the way that I do if I hadn’t also written them and thought about how they’re put together. I don’t think I would be able to go into a workshop and help my students critique each other’s manuscripts if I hadn’t also written and thought about the problems they’re up against. I don’t know that I could become a full-time writer anymore. I once thought that was all I wanted to do, but I like going into classes. I like talking about books. I like teaching workshops because I think they’re worthwhile. I know there’s a line of thought that says we’ve all crippled ourselves by doing all this teaching, that we should have written many more books than we have. But I don’t think productivity is a value in and of itself. I just don’t. In America, in capitalism, you often think, the more the better. I don’t think so. I never did.

Rutter

So, is this approach to the writing life an act of dissent? A response to the capitalist culture?

Baxter

It can be. But it’s not the solution.

It’s not a solution, but I’m not sure art can ever be a solution. It’s a place where you go for what you can’t get elsewhere. But I don’t think art will save us. Art will not save us from capitalism, or, really, from anything. I’m sorry, but it’s true.

---

Fady Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, and currently lives in Houston, but he isn’t generally described as Texan. His parents were born in Palestine and, besides the United States, his father’s career as a professor took the Joudah family to Libya and Saudi Arabia. Fady Joudah continues to lead a life of international engagement. He has practiced medicine in Zambia and Darfur, with Doctors Without Borders, and in what he describes as a “war zone” in Texas, the emergency room of a veterans hospital.

Joudah became well known in the literary world somewhat suddenly when, in 2008, his first book, The Earth in the Attic, was published as the winner of the Yale Younger Prize. That same year, The Butterfly’s Burden, his translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, won the Society of Authors’ Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. If I Were Another, Joudah’s second translation of Darwish’s work, was released in October 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

About The Earth in the Attic, Louise Glück writes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of the conception is inescapable. Fathers and brothers become prophets, hypothesis becomes dream, simple details of landscape transform themselves into emblems and predictions. The book is varied, coherent, fierce, tender: impossible to put down , impossible to forget. It will make itself felt.”

As a Palestinian-American, and having worked extensively with refugees around the world, Joudah expresses the sense of displacement poignantly, while offering hope through his view of its universality. In his poem “Proposal,” we see the displaced re-placed in disorienting, often alienating contexts: “I think of a little song and / How there must be a tree”; “We left our shoes behind and fled. / We left our scent in them / Then bled out our soles”; and “God reels the earth in when the sky rains / Like fish on a wire.” But it is the constant shifting, which the sea seems to do best, that offers the promise of survival:

And the sea, each time it reaches the shore,
Becomes a bird to see of the land
What it otherwise wouldn’t.
And the wind through the trees
Is the sea coming home.

Poetry, like the sea, offers accessibility to the things most longed for, as Joudah expresses in a piece he published in the Kenyon Review, “In Memory of Mahmoud Darwish,” in which he addresses Darwish: “I would memorize and forget you, tuck you in deep hiding places of my soul, as if I were slowly saturating my being with your seas…sea, that word that also stands for prosody in Arabic.”

We met with Joudah, during the annual AWP Conference, in the Chicago Hilton, where we discussed spiders, playing with time, and “one of the best-kept American secrets.”

SHIRA RICHMAN

I’d like to start with a question about the title of your book, The Earth in the Attic. As humans, our lives revolve around the earth, yet in this book the earth is relegated to an isolated, confined, but elevated place—the attic. Can you talk about how you happened upon this beautiful, strange metaphor?

FADY JOUDAH

It’s a metaphor that comes out of a simile that is in one of the poems in the book, “Along Came a Spider.” As the poem indicates, I happened on it because in one of the refugee settlements where I served, we would wake up an amazing plethora of spider webs after night rain. And spider webs disappear very quickly when the sun scorches them and the moisture evaporates. So it was an amazing scene to drive in the Jeep toward the clinic every morning during the rainy season and see the earth like an attic, in the sense that it was filled with spider webs.

As that poem, “Along Came a Spider,” addresses, it was for me the whole idea that the displaced people of the world, the stateless people of the world, or even the non-citizen citizens of the world—if you want to expand it beyond the boundaries of of governments, nation-states, and refugees—are in the attic. As you say, it is maybe, physically, a higher place. But not in all places is the attic a higher place. In some cultures the attic is a separate room, not necessarily a separate floor as we have in many of our homes. Nevertheless, it is just the idea that you store something you don’t want to throw away, your sense of existence—you store it and ignore it. Only when you move from that house do you check what you left in the attic and see what you want to take with you or throw away. It was that kind of negligence that I was after.

RICHMAN

Were you also thinking about the story of when spider webs hid Muhammad by covering the mouth of the cave and saving his life? Is there something especially treasured about spider webs?

JOUDAH

What interests me is: How does one divert his gaze to nature, without addressing nature as something separate from what we call human progress? Living where I was—I don’t like to name the place and I’m going to get to that—we were surrounded by spiders and other insects. You live comfortably with them. If you see a spider in your house, you don’t call the fire department. So I found myself roommating with spiders or living with spiders and that sent me to the childhood story about Muhammad and then to ideas of identity and spirituality and religion. And that also sent me to another concept, which is the very distinct reality that an Arab or a Muslim in the English language is and has been persistently dehumanized, really.

I say this with particular care, not to necessarily make that identity holy by virtue of an absolute sense of victimhood, because no victim is necessarily a saint and there is no such thing as a race of victims. But I do think there is an arc in the poem that tries to address the humanity of the name, beyond the jargon of history. There’s also a particular slippery slope in the poem I’d like to address about revolutionary ideas in general. I was trying to create, revolutionize, introduce the concept of displacement of the refugee as that which sends us into a new era of hope and “progress,” because it is that sense of horror as byproduct of the nation-state that will probably get us past this limitation of the nation-state and its concept of citizenry and so forth.

In a sense, all religions, when they arose, were modern, revolutionary; they broke with the past, and they advanced the people that initially jumped on the ship. They advanced people, whether or not they were monotheistic. Then myths and traditions and rituals take place. I went far to try to reengage the concept of modernity through the refugee. It’s a bit problematic because if you are a refugee or a stateless person or a displaced person, it does not necessarily mean you are some form of saint, whatever that means. But I think we don’t have enough recognition of the victim as a victim first and foremost. And there’s always a tendency toward apologetic that end up dehumanizing victims more and more.

REBECCA MORTON

Yesterday, at your reading, you mentioned that you work to not abstract people’s suffering.

JOUDAH

I think we all walk around with a filtered vision of other people’s suffering, and naturally we cannot preoccupy ourselves with it too much if we are going to go on with our daily lives, nor should we to a large extent. But I think that people’s suffering becomes a matter of image­-intensive desensitization. I think this is particularly the case for us in the U.S., because we are among the five percent of people in the world who have access to the Internet, to movies, to the digital age, and so forth. We think this access is actually the norm, because each of us has whatever phone we have that we can’t operate and laptops and so forth. I see the importance of universalizing suffering. One does not necessarily need to carry the banner of each trauma in the world to at least remain cognizant that suffering which plagues us all is really in large part a product of the abstraction of some people’s humanity and not others’.

Some people are seen as fully human, so their suffering is something we connect with and make holy, and other suffering is just racialized or what have you. There is—I think in Darfur—a stunning example of an entire movement that was and still is obsessed with naming the atrocities, and it is unfortunate because it does nothing for the people of Darfur. Even if the naming stuck, it would still do nothing for the people of Darfur. What remains of that “game of the name” is basically racial politics. I was shocked about this because I was there and suffering was far beyond the pettiness that we think of in our important intellectual skin here in the U.S. We’re always the interventionists; we’re always the ones who are able to do something about things. But the suffering I witnessed was beyond all this jargon.

Theodor Adorno wrote in his Minima Moralia something called The Paragraph. You won’t find it in all editions of Minima Moralia, but there’s a section in the book Can One Live After Auschwitz? called The Paragraph, and he basically talks about the term, the aporia, the paradox, or the unsolvability of naming something and what happens to the name, and he was specifically referring to the UN charter on genocide. It’s a fascinating precedent in the ’40s—around sixty years ago—about how this whole idea of naming genocide will eventually turn into a game of names. After what point does suffering on a mass scale deserve no name and become something that has to be addressed, or at least recognized, by everybody?

I go back to the concept of the universality of suffering. The answer to this for some people is: Well, we’ve decided in international law, which is an important thing if it is at least adhered to and approved—and that is nor the case—that if it’s genocide, we will intervene. The game of the name is to do enough to where those who know how to play with the law—whether they wrote the law or know how to play with the wording—go far enough in their atrocities not to have it called genocide.

So what happens? Ethnic cleansing is, in many people’s minds, an early stage of genocide. So do you not intervene there? What about civil war that is so horrific in its detail, in the Congo, or in Angola when they had their civil war, or in Sri Lanka, or in places that didn’t have civil war—what the Indonesian government did in East Timor? How can you claim that there is a holiness of suffering more important than another or even a legality of suffering? How can you turn such massive suffering into a classification? And whatever answer you give, we have enough history to show us that we know what happens with the politicization of suffering. It dehumanizes the victims repeatedly.

I’m not necessarily saying that we should reduce our threshold for intervention. I’m not necessarily sure that the word “intervention” is the modum operandum here for me, but I think what interests me the most is: Are we truly willing to recognize, first and foremost, suffering, without gaming the name? And then, if we get to that point, what happens afterward? Because I think it would be, hopefully, a brighter moment.

REBECCA HALONEN

How do you understand the role of a poet in all this? What is the poet’s duty?

JOUDAH

I don’t think that writing the poems themselves has to address these issues necessarily, but I do think that one has to be engaged, as a whole person, with such things, to be open to them and courageous enough to recant one’s errors of judgment regarding a larger humanity. I say these words as though I’ve reached this state, but I’m very far from it.

I can’t say that poets should do this or write that. It’s an art form; it’s an imaginative state of being that dabbles with time, and it cannot necessarily be limited to certain concepts. There’s a lot more to poetry and art than the drama of American family life or the politics of refugees. There’s room for both ends of the spectrum, I think.

Bertrand Russell engaged himself as a literary man and a morally committed person. For instance, many of us don’t know that the Russell Tribunal (after Russell’s death) for human rights declared the U.S. action in Vietnam to be genocide. And here’s a man who was celebrated in the English world and the Western world and the world over, won the Nobel Prize and whatever. It is not necessary to say that the U.S. has to be punished or not punished. I’m not even getting there. All I’m saying is that the Tribunal’s declaration should be recognized. Again, until we recognize such things, morality becomes a political game.

A poet should be engaged wholly with such morally difficult questions, being very careful and aware of the slippery slope of proximity to power. You don’t want to raise a banner. We can all get a little too passionate and find out twenty years later that we actually got a little too intense about an ideal or an ideology and ended up as fascist as those we were professing against. But we do have examples of people like Bertolt Brecht or Walter Benjamin who were Marxists and had no trouble backing away from Marxism, when it stood as a political regime they recognized as a problem.

A poet has to be fully engaged, but also has to be careful of the dangers of ideology. I think a poet should struggle for a form of moral and cognitive independence from the jargon of politics or history.

HALONEN

Do you think political poetry is attempting to do that?

JOUDAH

I don’t like the term political poetry. I think it is demeaning, and probably a reflection of certain problems within the literary canon and its relationship to power establishments. It’s convenient to call something political poetry, because it seems to deflect how the poetry establishment itself is deeply embedded, naturally or otherwise, within the larger political system of power, and I think it’s essentially a description as full of hot air as truly propagandist poets are.

There is no such thing as political poetry and non-political poetry. There’s good poetry and bad poetry. Whether good poetry happens to be about your dog or about war—it doesn’t matter to me. But anyway, there’s good poetry. And good poetry is not simply defined by form and theme. There’s a larger human engagement that should be addressed within it.

MORTON

You touched on this before, but I’d like to return to naming. There are no place names—or very few place names—in your book, and because of this, I think the reader is a little unsure about how to inhabit the poems. It feels a little like we, as readers, not being placed, are in a sort of exile. I wonder about exile and the position of the outsider in the poems.

JOUDAH

I have to answer in two parts. I think that refusing to name the place is because of the tendency toward sensationalizing the locale, and that distracts from the suffering and the humanity of others. People refer to Darfur in my book of poems, and I insist on not mentioning which parts of the poems speak of Palestine and which speak of the Congolese and Angolan refugees I took care of in Zambia. But it’s interesting that some people feel a particular sense of comfort in mentioning Darfur, and that’s their problem, not mine.

There’s a lot of stuff that merges with so many other states of being. I hated the idea that people would say, ” Did you hear what he wrote about in Zambia?” And it’s not necessarily about Zambia. It’s about the human condition.

There’s no doubt that identifying myself as a Palestinian rubs many people the wrong way. The information is also utilized by people to ends I’m not interested in whatever those ends are. You mention the word “Palestinian,” and you get people standing on either side of the aisle. I’m not interested in that in my poetry—maybe in some other arena, but not in my poetry. Sometimes it’s comical to me to hear the commentary or to read reviews because some people are trying to dabble with how to make sense of political views in the book. Actually, what they’re trying to do is make sense of their own political views or lack thereof, not necessarily the poetry that I’m trying to write.

As for exile, I think it’s the state of the poet, period, whether it’s internal exile or external exile, and in most cases it’s both, which I think is also a state of the human condition. I think we all feel internally exiled from ourselves or even our loved ones. You wake in the morning and you’re tired of going to work. You put on a particular persona when you’re at work, and it’s different when you’re at home and it’s different when you’re with your mother or your father or your wife, husband, and so forth. Sometimes the pressures of life make you feel like you’re far from who you think you are or who you aspire to be or all these things that we grapple with in modern day psychology. Then there’s the external exile, which goes back to the original point that I mentioned—the idea of one of the syndromes of our contemporary existence: What does it mean to be a citizen?

MORTON

I read that you began writing during your residency. What was it that you wanted or needed in poetry during that time?

JOUDAH

Chinua Achebe said something about how you write because you have a story to tell. I have a story to tell; I could have written novels or I could have written essays, but why did I write poetry? I don’t think anyone knows how to answer that question. I just think it’s some little twist in the brain, that I’m inclined to the rhythms and patterns of poetry as opposed to other methods of linguistic expression.

HALONEN

Do you write in Arabic?

JOUDAH

No. My relationship to Arabic has become quite automatic. There are many instances where I am probably writing something in English directly from Arabic, not being conscious of it at the moment, but when I put it down on paper I realize exactly where the syntax came from, exactly where the automatic translation process came from.

RICHMAN

Why don’t you write in Arabic?

JOUDAH

Because I exist in English, I guess, for a large part—as far as writing poetry. In reaction to that, I chose translation from Arabic into English to maintain a relationship to Arabic in poetry. But I have a busy life as it is—as a physician, a father, and a husband. I’m trying to write, I’m glad to be writing. I’m writing and so I’m happy about that. I don’t want to put too much emphasis on linking my identity to the language that I write in, as if it’s somehow part of a political statement or a cultural statement. I’m glad to be writing poems when I can.

HALONEN

Can you talk a little bit about the opportunities or limitations of translation?

JOUDAH

Translation is a mistreated aspect of poetry. I think all poetry is translated. Perhaps all life is translation, since we consider reality as a matter of perception, and so is our perception of our own reality through language. It comes across as a translation. At least in creative writing as opposed to the hackneyed speech that we all share over the air and whatnot. So that is one aspect of it.

The other aspect is that the actual process of taking work and writing it in a new language gets a bad rap in the sense that the concept of fidelity is, I think, prostituted by even the best minds. Because there is no such thing as infidelity and there is no such thing as fidelity. All forms of translation suffer from fidelity and benefit from it, and suffer from infidelity and benefit from that. Those who say, “Well, you should try to make it seem as much of a natural poem as in the host language,” are after fidelity in a different way than those who say, “No, you should be strictly accurate and representative of the original language.” They’re after a different kind of fidelity. Or a different kind of infidelity. Freud would be happy with this.

What’s most important for me in translation is the transference of the spirit of the text. If I translate poetry five or ten years from now, I might have a different opinion, because I think my relationship to language changes as I learn more and have different opinions about it and so I approach things differently. I do think translation should attempt to infuse something new in the host language, so it allows for that sense of mystery to exist, as opposed to those who want a natural poem in the host language—whatever that means, because “a natural poem” has its own problems. The host language has a wide array of “natural poems.” I think Celan said, “There is no such thing as translation. You write a new poem.” I disagree with him, because my poems take a lot longer to write than it takes me to translate. But that’s not what he was talking about. I think he meant that if you’re infusing something, you are writing a new poetry, introducing a new poetry.

RICHMAN

You seem to use rhythm deliberately in your work, and in many places I’ve noticed a symmetrical meter, most obviously in the titles The Earth in the Attic and The Butterfly’s Burden. When scanned, they have identical rhythms. There’s symmetry in many parts of the poem “Pulse”—in section seven, within the line: “One of us shouted Wow in her sleep,” and between the lines of the last couplet of section nine: “Then saplings and mud. / And then the dried sand.” How deliberate are you in determining your rhythms?

JOUDAH

Not very, at this point. I used to count syllables a lot, and not for lines. I counted them sometimes for sentences, and sometimes, in shorter poems, I counted them for the totality of the poem. But not per line. I do like the focus on a deliberate rhythm, as you call it. And I also do like occasional merging between classical prosody, if you will, and a contemporary sense of rhythm. But I go a lot by my ear, knowing that poetry is largely dependent on normal speech, whatever that means, and on normal speech patterns, which are varied.

There’s an interesting concept in formal contemporary Arabic poetry, similar to what I said, where the unit for prosody, which is called taf ‘eelah, is basically in the entire poem or in the entire stanza, so it’s not dependent on a line. And I was always interested in this way of looking at the whole poem. That goes back to why I used to count syllables in the entire poem. If I had an even number, I considered the poem metrically complete. But that’s obviously not true, because you can also have an odd number and it all depends on whether you use an anapest or a dactyl or a trochee and, again, it goes back to speech patterns, so it’s not fixed. But it is a whole idea that in the sentence, in the stanza, or in the entire poem, there is a sense of complete foot count, if you will, a complete meter of sorts, without the focus on line-per-line symmetry.

RICHMAN

I don’t know if I’m imagining this, but in “The Onion Poem,” is there a glimmer of a ghazal?

JOUDAH

I remember sharing that poem with Marilyn Hacker, and she said, ”I’m glad to see you’re making your own form of a ghazal.”

I don’t like the ghazal form, though, to tell you the truth.

I don’t disparage it at all, but somehow it just doesn’t appeal to me. I like repetition in poetry, and I think poetry is dependent on repetition and parallel, but I’m not into that form. I guess you could say if the idea in “The Onion Poem ” is to repeat the tone of question—the repetition of question and answer, which is an ancient idea in poetry—you could say that it parallels the ghazal in that sense. I guess “The Onion Poem” presents its own dialectic in the first question and resolves it, seemingly, in the answer, in the reply. But then again, if I say that, I am not paralleling the ghazal line; I’m just paralleling an ancient method of call and response in poetry.

Formal elements in poetry, especially in free verse, are wonderful when they go past that idea of metrics and numbers, because there are so many aspects of language that lend themselves to formality, whether regarding alliteration or anaphora or epiphora or parallelism or chiasmus. All these wonderful tools, for me, are what make the free verse poem formal.

RICHMAN

In the poem “Proposal,” the sea becomes loosed from its seabed and becomes a bird. It becomes wind, which allows it to see aspects of land and to know the trees as home. To what extent do you identify with the sea?

JOUDAH

I don’t know. I feel a little emotional to address the question. It’s a trope. The sea is a trope. I guess I can hide behind that in my answer.

RICHMAN

I was wondering if you were referencing the fact that the Mediterranean Sea dried up at one time and then somehow returned to its place?

JOUDAH

If I engage in this conversation, I’d be analyzing the privacy of the poem, dragging it out into some sort of a factual discussion, and I think that would take away from it. For me, it’s important that readers see and hear that sea the way they wish—as the Mediterranean or as the sea you hear in the air when you’re far from the sea. I’m also aware that some people don’t know what to do with the mention of the word “Haifa,” for instance.

I’m addressing my wife and her father and my father. But really, the poem was written far away from the past and the Mediterranean. I can tell you that much.

MORTON

In the book’s first poem, “Atlas,” the speaker says, “Let me tell you a fable.” This sort of storytelling appears throughout the book. Why?

JOUDAH

I don’t have a spontaneous inclination toward a full narrative poem, but I think narrative is essential to poetry and to the contemporary poem. To incorporate it, I have to wed it to lyric. Some people have a rash about the concept of “lyric narrative,” and some people are puritans—either there’s a lyric poem or a narrative poem. I guess I believe in that merger, or that unity.

I have a tendency toward playing with time. Narrative means that there is a chronological order, or disorder, but I try to incorporate lyric into my narrative so that the narrative appears to be from within my time and from without it. Some people might use the word “legend” or “myth” for that, and for me, much good poetry comes out of the attempt, the successful attempt, to rewrite myth.

But what is meant by myth? Is it the sublimation of a ritual? And I mean sublimation in the way solid goes into gas, that chemical process. So you take a ritual and you somehow release it of its own physical properties through the language of time. Whatever that means. In interviews you have to say, “Whatever that means.” You have to include these disclaimers.

HALONEN

Which poets do you return to?

JOUDAH

I think it varies in different phases. I used to go back to Rilke, but I don’t look at him at all now. These days I go back to George Oppen. I love his lyric. I think he’s an incredibly engaged poet with the world and has a wonderful sense of humanity that pierces through ideology. A light with luminosity. You can see there’s something magical about his abandonment of poetry. He quit poetry and then twenty-odd years later he returned and had a very prolific output in his older years. Through those years you see how he progressed with his syntax. Or not how he progressed, but how he varied and experimented with syntax and lyric. It’s refreshing to see this engagement with the world in his actual life and in his poetry while still being true to art itself—instead of getting lost in ideologies.

He’s one of the best-kept American secrets. There is a rise to his name now because we are in a state of war. Which I think diminishes his brilliance. This brings me back to political poetry—a lot of people consider George Oppen a political poet, which for me is just absurd. Maybe it’s similar to how people get all worked up about the term “confessional poetry.”

RICHMAN

I read that when you were seven, you were watching television, and you announced to your mother that you wanted to be a doctor. What were you watching?

JOUDAH

I don’t know. I know there was a family gathering—my aunts and cousins and so forth—and we were in Libya at the time. It’s a question we all know—everyone turns to you when you’re younger and says, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I don’t know why I said I wanted to be a doctor.

I must have been overwhelmed by some sense of…I was thinking about it this morning actually, and this is a way to address the restructuring of memory. This morning I wanted to say that I must have felt some sort of angst in the room or in the family situation. Something must have happened. My family—my immediate family and aunts and uncles and my older cousins—are all refugees in the true sense of the word. They had rough childhoods. I don’t know if some of that sense of anxiety was somehow seeping in the conversation and I picked up on it and decided that I had to say something or whatever. I have no idea.

RICHMAN

When did you realize your interest in poetry?

JOUDAH

Probably around the same age, because I used to memorize a lot of poetry when I was younger and recite it and get encouragement and support for such memorization. I started to write random lines— three- or four-line poems or something in Arabic prosody. So I think I’ve had that interest since a young age, but there was all this side-tracking, with the medicine and leaving one culture and coming to the next. Eventually, I realized I just had to keep writing. I had to keep expressing my own existence.

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JESS WALTER FOLLOWED A CONVOLUTED PATH into the literary mainstream: He was a newspaper reporter who became a nonfiction author who became a ghostwriter who became a mystery novelist who became a literary novelist who also writes screenplays. But no matter the genre,  Walter’s work is stamped with vivid watermarks—prose that blends rapid-fire rants with unerring rhythm, a dark humor that has been called “standup tragedy,” an engagement with the political and social, and a devotion to storytelling. “The idea that plot is this ugly, brutish thing that we have to drape our beauty over is infuriating,” he says, “because to me, plot is this beautiful, elegant shape.”  

His essays, short fiction, criticism, and journalism have appeared in Details, Playboy, Willow Springs, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the  Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere. His nonfiction book,  Every Knee Shall Bow, was a finalist for the PEN Center West literary nonfiction award in 1996. His novel Citizen Vince won a 2006 Edgar  Allan Poe award, and his following novel, The Zero, was a finalist for the  2006 National Book Award. 

Walter started his career writing for his hometown newspaper, the Spokesman-Review, where he helped cover the standoff between Randy  Weaver and federal agents at Ruby Ridge, in North Idaho—work that eventually led to the publication of Every Knee Shall Bow in 1996. His first novel, Over Tumbled Graves, came out in 2001, followed by The Land of the Blind, Citizen Vince, The Zero, and most recently, The Financial  Lives of the Poets, which Time magazine called “a small masterpiece, a  Wodehouse-level comic performance. But it’s also a deceptively amusing  survey of the post-Fannie-and-Freddie American landscape, with a mother lode of bitter truths lying right below its perfect, manicured  lawns.”  

We spoke with Walter over two meetings at Spokane’s Davenport  Hotel, which features prominently in The Land of the Blind. “It’s taken  me a long time,” Walter said, “to arrive at a place where I feel like I’m  doing the work I set out to do.” 

SAMUEL LIGON 

How has your writing career evolved or developed since your start as a journalist? 

JESS WALTER 

It’s evolved accidentally, the way natural selection works in making platypuses. If you decided to become a literary writer by going into journalism and then ghostwriting and then writing mysteries, that’s the worst path you could take. I like to say I’ve taken the service entrance into literary fiction. 

I started at the newspaper in 1986 as a junior in college. When Ruby Ridge happened in 1992, I started sending out proposals right away and I took sabbaticals from the newspaper to work on that book. Later, my publisher asked if I wanted to help write Chris Darden’s book on the  O.J. Simpson trial. I was compelled by Darden’s Shakespearean angst. I teased him about it later, and called him “Black Hamlet” because I  didn’t understand what he was so anxious about. 

 My publisher at the time said, “Would you be interested in helping  him write his book?” In my naiveté, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as ghostwriting. I knew it existed, but I didn’t realize it was an industry, so when she asked me to help him, I just assumed we were going to write it together. We sat down to negotiate, and I didn’t have an agent at the time. I sat across from his agent, his lawyer, and Chris,  and they have this contract that says I’m ghostwriting, and I said, “I’m not doing this if my name’s not on the book.” They were like, “How big  do you want your name?” I said, “I want my mom to see it from outside  a bookstore window.” So that was the agreement, and then there was discussion about what the cover would say—“By Christopher Darden,  as told to,” or “By Christopher Darden with”—and I said, “I don’t care about that. I just think it’s a lie to not have my name on the cover.”

Later, when I would do ghostwriting projects—I didn’t want my name on a book once I realized the stigma, and once it became clear to me that ghostwriting was not what I wanted to do. But that was the first ghost job, the Darden book, and again, it wasn’t strictly a ghost project,  because my name’s on it. And also, this was a really intelligent guy, and I  said, “We’re going to write this book together.” So we had two laptops,  and we’d write sentences back and forth. It was collaborative. I moved in with him. And I feel…everything’s accidental, nothing’s planned,  but I look at that early part of my career, the ghostwriting, which began with Darden and ended with the Bernard Kerik situation placing me at Ground Zero. I’ve got Ruby Ridge, the O.J. Simpson case, the terrorist attacks of September 11th. I kind of had a perfect fiction writer’s vantage to these cases that, for someone who loves satire and writing about the culture, turned out to be perfect training. It’s not the training I’d advise someone to undertake, and I was miserable through much of it, but it turned out to be a great track to the kind of fiction I wanted to write. 

LIGON

How have your books changed from Every Knee Shall Bow to The  Financial Lives of the Poets? 

WALTER

Each book I write is a kind of reaction to the last one. It’s a constant leveling and adjustment to try to make each book complete and full in itself. When you’re in a book, you’re not thinking about the next one or the last one, you’re only thinking about the one you’re in, but you bring the way the last one felt. My starting point is often, The last one felt like this, now I need to do that. Especially Over Tumbled Graves—I  was stunned that everyone saw it as a mystery novel. I look back now and see that’s because it was a mystery novel. You put a serial killer in your book, people tend to treat it like a serial killer book. You eat one lousy foot, they call you a cannibal. But at the time I was writing it, I  thought I was writing this deep literary novel that happened to have serial killers and cops in it. And then when it came out, that wasn’t the response. So, with Land of the Blind I thought, Well, I’ll nudge it over a little further. And with Citizen Vince, I think I was a little aware of the way these books were landing, the way they were received, the way they were perceived, the way they were put into bookstores.

There are all sorts of indignities along the way that cause you to do certain things. I remember I was excited to have a reading at Powell’s,  this amazing bookstore. I told some friends to meet me there. I didn’t really think that two o’clock in the afternoon was a funny time for a  reading at Powell’s. So my friends show up and I walk to the desk and  say, “I’m Jess Walter, I have a reading here.” The woman at the counter says, “Oh, that’s a drop-in signing. What’s your book about?” And I said,  “Well, it’s a kind of literary crime novel about a serial killer—” I didn’t  even finish and she grabs the microphone and says, “Genre department.”  This guy comes forward and my friends are standing right there and I’m thinking, Oh, this sucks! 

LIGON 

Can you talk about the difference between “literary” fiction and  “genre” fiction? 

WALTER

I’ve often felt frustrated at the divide between commercial and literary fiction, because to me, it hurts both. You can have this horrible writing in crime fiction because people only focus on plots, and they treat them like crossword puzzles. “Well, I knew who the killer was on page eleven! I’ve solved it! Why do I need to keep reading?” And when people complain about literary fiction, they say there’s not enough story.  So I’ve always felt like there’s got to be some sweet spot in the middle you can hit. With Land of the Blind, I thought, Oh, I’m writing a coming of age novel, and I’m kind of melding it with this other thing, and it’s also a novel of ideas! You have all the conventions of crime fiction that I  wasn’t following. There was no murder. It starts with a confession instead of the body, which is where you start with a murder mystery. I wanted someone to come in and confess to a crime that hasn’t actually been committed. And then it was a kind of twenty-five-year-long murder that began when they were children—it’s really about the way he treated this guy as a kid. So it was, in my mind, a coming-of-age novel disguised.  Again, you hit what you think is some sweet spot and no one wants it.  People really want crime fiction and they love those books. You mess with the conventions, they don’t understand why. I was making Subaru  Brats—you know those little Subarus that were a cross between a pickup and a car? Nobody wanted those or there would be a bunch of them around today. And I made a great Subaru Brat, but I was the only one who appreciated it. 

LIGON 

Do you think anybody succeeds in that kind of hybrid? 

WALTER

I think Richard Price comes closest. Once he established his literary bona fides he could write crime fiction. Pete Dexter, because he won the  National Book Award, can write a crime novel and have his position. John Banville wins a Booker Prize and can go write crime fiction. But it doesn’t work the other way. You can’t name someone who’s made a career as a crime writer who is then respected as a literary novelist. 

SHAWN VESTAL

But after you won the Edgar for Citizen Vince, the next book, The  Zero, was a finalist for the National Book Award. 

WALTER

When I say no one’s done it, I kind of think I’m the only one.  [Laughs.] And I don’t know that most people want to do that. It’s one of those Guinness Book of World Records things that no one else really wants to do. You stand on your head on a toilet for four years and you’ve done it longer than anyone else. It’s not a path a lot of people want to take. 

BRENDAN LYNAUGH

Citizen Vince felt like more than a crime novel. Were you aware that you were turning a corner? 

WALTER

It felt like the kind of novel I wanted to be writing. I get really excited about thematic elements, probably more than I should, and more than most writers. I kept thinking, This is really about voting. That was the sweet spot I had always imagined between crime fiction and literary fiction—you know, that I could create characters that were hopefully deep and rich. There would be all these ideas swirling around, especially in the character Vince and in his monologues. I like ranting and riffing,  and Vince could do that in a voice I was pleased with, and yet, I could still drape it over the conventions of a crime novel. I think it was more the sort of novel I’d imagined I would write all along. And it does feel like I turned a corner at that point. And then I moved on to The Zero and Financial Lives of the Poets. 

LYNAUGH

You’ve mentioned having to teach yourself how to write a novel.  Can you remember big moments in that process? 

WALTER

I still feel like I’m teaching myself all the time, learning things and in a constant conversation with myself about what it is. The emotions of writing a novel, the highs and lows, the ups and downs, the loathing for what you’ve written—I described it in my journal at one point as the diary of a man living on the ocean who has no idea what tides are. “Oh my God, the water’s going out! It’s a drought! Oh my God, the water’s coming in! It’s a flood!” I couldn’t believe how seriously I took this. With every book I would say, “If this is not the worst thing ever written… I need to just throw this away and start from scratch.” And then the next day, I would say, “I may be writing a new kind of literature here. There’s a very good chance that my grandchildren will have to study this book. I should put a little note in there for them.” The grandiosity was stunning, and the lows were stunning, too. 

I think of it as this engine, these pistons going up and down. The process that I fool myself with is that I write the last sentence last, and so  I’ll comb over the beginning so many times, but I can’t finish if I feel like there’s something wrong early on. I always have to go back and rewrite things. The moment I finish a novel, I always feel the same incredible high. My finishes are phony at first. I always have to go back through dozens of times, but that sense, when I write the last sentence and pull my hands away or clap my hands like a Vegas dealer, it’s thrilling. And then maybe a week later, or two days later, the crashing doubt comes back. I’ve learned now that I love almost every part of that journey. I even love the self-loathing. I think to separate the hypercritical self-loathing writer from the one who dreams of doing something beyond his ability is impossible and probably not even worthwhile. I don’t think you could have one without the other. 

I just read David Shields’ new book Reality Hunger and now my debate and argument with myself is also with him. I’m constantly walking  around, saying, “Well, take that, David Shields!” or “What about this,  David Shields?” Which is great—to have a foil. But that book was remarkable and vexing in so many ways. I found myself walking around arguing with him, which is such a pointless thing to do. It reminded me of some drunk guy on the dorm floor you’re trying to argue with and he just keeps quoting Pink Floyd. You can’t win that argument. And other times, it reminded me of arguing with a girlfriend, because you say, “Well, clearly this, this, and this,” and she says, “But that’s just how I feel.” You can’t win that, either. 

But it makes me want to debate those points, because I think it’s a really compelling case, a great read, and really powerful work. Because it’s a manifesto, it wants to make a case, and it’s a case I would certainly argue with. First, that narrative is dead, and that there’s some supplanting of it by a desire for reality. I think the reality that we’re really desiring is far more narrative-driven than he’s letting on. We don’t really want reality. We want reality set in a certain narrative frame. What we really want is the Elephant Man. We want freak show. Reality tv is not like the lyric essay, which is the thing he’s arguing for. It’s like the Elephant  Man. It’s the freakiest stuff you can imagine. That’s what we want to see on YouTube—glimpses of the freakish. 

I find it illustrative that A Million Little Pieces was rejected as a novel, because you couldn’t get away with that shit in fiction, but you can, oddly enough, in this kind of hybrid nonfiction thing. So there’s the idea that fiction and nonfiction have blended in a way. That because history is subjective, that because memoirs only come from memory,  because journalism has been proven to be imperfect, there should be no filter between fiction and nonfiction, which I find to be almost insane, almost a kind of academic trick in which you point to a swamp and say, “Look, therefore there is no land, nor water. They are only the same thing.” And you get there through some sort of “if or then” dialogue with yourself, and pretty soon, you’re trying to drive a boat through the desert. You can’t do that. 

Just because there are places where there’s swampland doesn’t mean that there isn’t a desire and need and higher form for nonfiction and fiction. So that’s the argument I walk around having. Zadie Smith wrote about Reality Hunger—something like, “All right, Mr. Shields, read better fiction. You’re right. There’s a lot that’s dead with fiction. Now go read the good stuff, because those manipulations and tired conventions are exactly what good fiction tries to overcome and subvert and not fall victim to.” 

LIGON

You suggested that nonfiction can get away with stuff that fiction can’t. Like what? 

WALTER

What was Tom Wolfe’s famous pronouncement? That fiction can’t keep up with the real world? I think fiction has the responsibility of a kind of universality that nonfiction doesn’t. A good example is Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. His portrayal of Tourette’s is—to anyone who has nervous habits or tics or things—so real that it immediately takes you inside that condition. It’s brilliant for that. It isn’t just someone with Tourette’s spouting dirty words, which is what the reality television version would be. It’s a human portrayal of this thing that may be freakish to people who don’t have it, but through Lethem’s telling is a fully realized and human condition that we relate to. 

LIGON

You mentioned two North Korean pieces the other day, one fiction, one nonfiction. What could the nonfiction deliver that the fiction couldn’t? 

WALTER

The first thing that pops into my head that the nonfiction delivered was context. Both pieces had to do with the period of starvation in North Korea. Both had people making this sort of paste from tree bark that they would eat. In some ways, the nonfiction was more harrowing for its authority, for its truth, I guess. It provided context. I found out how many people starved to death during this period. And the nonfiction piece was structured almost like a short story, which is really interesting, because it was not a big societal piece. It was focused on one woman who had been a party believer and whose husband and mother and one of her children had starved to death. She’d finally made her way into South Korea. And it was a narrative of these people starving to death, with the context that this was happening to the entire nation, the politics behind it, the seamless way in which those externalities could be brought in and not break you out of the illusion of the piece. You could come in and out of narrative and pure informative reporting, and I think when fiction does that—one good example is The Known World—it can be thrilling, but it’s also a really tricky thing. It’s an innovation of voice that when I see it, I’m kind of thrilled. That’s what this nonfiction piece was able to do. 

The great thing about it, the thing I would probably agree with  David Shields about, is that it did not require a movement at the end. It did not require some artful ending. It just ended. The woman went to South Korea. She lived with her daughter and she put on a bunch of weight. There didn’t need to be one last scene in which she goes out to the woods and strips some tree bark and takes it home because she’s acquired a taste for it. It was able to sort of just play itself out. 

The short story (which hasn’t been published yet but is forthcoming in Playboy) by Adam Johnson was about an orphan in the same time period, who kidnaps Japanese tourists and brings them back to North  Korea—kind of sanctioned by the army. The story is full of starvations, full of all this stuff, and the movement of it, the artful movement is really pleasing and yet you’re aware that that’s where it’s going. When it finishes, you have the sense of release of a story. You’ve been taken to this world and then released from it. And you’ve seen a full movement of character. You’ve seen something that wasn’t required in the nonfiction piece, a reckoning or a surprise or some other narrative turn; the stone was carved into a figure. And I think we know those effects and we know those feelings that we expect to get from both, and maybe that’s what  Shields finds so thrilling about the hybrid style that he’s working in. To confuse those effects, to fire off these neurons when you expected those to be fired off, that’s what every fiction writer hopes to do—to not give you what you expect, but something that’s satisfying in some way and which you didn’t see coming. 

LIGON

Do you think that the nonfiction was about a phenomenon that occurred in North Korea and something systemic to North Korea, and the fiction was about a person?

WALTER

It’s funny, because the nonfiction was about a person, and this person was used to illustrate a condition within North Korea. And so the person was almost a way of viewing the larger context, whereas in the short story, the context was backdrop at most, or was a way to sort of narrow down on that person. You know the world you’re in. You’re in North Korea. It’s this period of hardship and starvation and that telescopes down on the individual, whereas the other one opens up the world that way. I do think those are both intriguing shapes and that they do very different things. Thank God for both. 

LYNAUGH

Often in your books, the main character has some sort of disability— the blindness in The Zero, and various characters in other books who can’t sleep the entire story. What does disability do for your novels? 

WALTER

I think everybody has some disability. I think that’s the condition of being human. What happens when they’re more visible, more on the surface? You’re definitely putting pressure on. That’s what I like about crime in fiction. I like conflict that’s sharper and higher-pitched. And I like that within—I think it’s another kind of conflict, a conflict within the character, and the way in which the world deals with these people and they deal with the world. I guess it’s heightening that stuff. 

I got a stick in my eye when I was five and had to train myself to look people in the eye, because when I was a kid I would constantly look down so that other kids wouldn’t make fun of me—so to me, disability is a very real state of humanity that I think we all have in some way. I  think I use the vision and eyesight issues because that’s such an elemental and key way in which we deal with each other. I also think it’s probably an autobiographical desire of mine to try to explore this in fiction. 

LIGON

In Land of the Blind, Clark lost an eye as a kid. In The Zero, Remy has a problem with detached retinas. How does your experience of getting a stick in the eye when you were a kid move away from autobiography in your work and take on a fictional quality? 

WALTER

Autobiography is a tool of the fiction writer. I think that Land of the  Blind is all about vision, about how Clark sees himself, how the world sees him. And the gaps within there. You become interested in those things in a really personal way, and then I think the thing to do with fiction is refine that interest, refine that sort of thematic push that you have in something until it takes on some meaning you weren’t aware of. I think you arrive at levels of meaning in fiction that you don’t always reach with memoir, that you might not reach with any other kind of writing because of the process, which forces you to go possibly deeper into character than you would with nonfiction or memoir. I think it forces you to create themes that are even more alive than a memoir would be. We’ve all read those autobiographies by generals or politicians, in which you think, “Were they even around for their own life?” They seem to be describing it as this series of achievements that have no motivations connected to them. 

VESTAL

You write about the newspaper industry in The Financial Lives of the  Poets. Do you think the decline of journalism’s had an impact on fiction? 

WALTER 

It’s hard to not focus on the ancillary effects, where the review is going to come from and things like that. I’ve always thought that journalism has been a great training ground for novelists. I would make twenty-seven percent of our novelists go work at a newspaper, because you learn to navigate these systems. 

You cover any sort of politics, you cover crime. You begin to see the difference between public and private, the way people show themselves in public and the way they really are. You learn the mechanisms of a culture, how a courtroom works, how a police department works, how an election works. One of the ghost jobs I did involved a political campaign and these political operatives…. I’ve got these characters stowed away. They’re such great characters because they have insight into the hypocrisies that we know are there, but we don’t exactly know how they work. That precision, that journalistic precision, is something.  Like Richard Price. He’s very much like a documentarian in that style. He’s in there, in those cop cars, in those projects. He’s working with those social workers, and to hear anyone describe his process, it sounds exactly like immersion journalism. So in that way, I think journalists can be outward-looking in their fiction; I think they can get beyond the limits of their own experience and imagination more freely because of their training. 

Also, you write every day. You lose fear of publication. You know how to work on deadlines. But you also get out of yourself as a writer.  You write something that is very utilitarian—people use it. It’s sort of disposable. I remember being in MFA workshops and people bringing their stories in and the angst of that room was almost too much for me to bear. They had so much invested and I never felt that. 

At a newspaper someone is going to handle your stuff. They’re going to edit it, they’re going to change things. You learn to keep your stories separate from yourself. That’s valuable for a new writer because the fear of publication stops a lot of people from working, the idea that it’s got to be perfect. No journalist goes in thinking that they know everything at the beginning, and yet, today, as a fiction writer, you almost get more attention for your debut novel than the ones after. You’re expected to kind of arrive as this fully formed artist, and I know I wasn’t. It’s taken me a long time to arrive at a place where I feel like I’m doing the work I set out to do. I used to have an editor at the newspaper who would say,  “All right, this is beautiful writing here, but you have three adjectives.  We’re going to pick one. What’s the best one?” I was constantly pruning and looking for the telling detail. 

Also, because of the constraints on space, I think journalists often write better-paced fiction, which is the reason people love crime fiction and other potboilers. It’s not that people have bloodlust. It’s about pacing. 

VESTAL 

Many of your books have humorous elements. What makes something funny? And how do you use that toward a serious purpose? 

WALTER 

One of the tics I’m trying to get away from is tending toward things only because they’re funny. A few times, I’ll find myself so in love with something I thought was funny that it takes away from the narrative or it introduces something that strains credulity. Some of the humor in Citizen Vince I’m proudest of is the really quiet stuff. It doesn’t come out of absurdity. It just comes out of small character moments. I guess some of it is absurd, two guys in a witness protection program debating the pizza in town, but that’s also a complaint I’ve heard from every New Yorker who ever moved to Spokane, so it seems weirdly grounded, too. You don’t want anything to be a crutch. Plot has been a crutch for me,  suspense has been a crutch for me, and sometimes I think humor is a  crutch for me. 

LIGON

Plot seems to be one of the hardest things to talk about, and people  often ask writers, “Do you know the plot before you go in?” What do you know of the story before you start actually writing words? 

WALTER

There’s a fallacy that the story starts when you’re writing words. I  walk around with the idea, with the characters, with all of that stuff,  until I think I may have a clear sense of what that story is—before I  start writing it. 

I’m going to digress a little bit. One of the frustrations I have with  Shields’ book is that he keeps saying narrative is clearly dead, that clearly no one likes narrative. And it’s like, No! People are reading Dan Brown not because he’s a great prose stylist, but because of the narrative. Story is alive and well. People love it. And it doesn’t even have to be a new story. It can be the same old story. That central premise is totally wrong. 

I loved reading Charles Baxter’s essay on rhyming action, because  to me, there’s an artistic elegance in plot and story. There’s a sense among some people that there’s been an academic movement away from storytelling. There was a great essay—and I call it great because it was infuriating to me in so many ways—that blamed the Cult of the  Sentence for the death of literary fiction, the much talked about death of literary fiction, the idea being that somehow, writers focusing only on the sentence as a unit of beauty and on the writing itself, have divorced themselves from what readers want. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but I have heard writers say, “I don’t want any story at all. I just  want beautiful language.” And I think, first of all, Bullshit. But second of all, the idea that plot is this ugly, brutish thing that we have to drape our beauty over is infuriating, because to me, plot is this beautiful, elegant shape. And that’s what I get so thrilled about in writing. That’s what I got excited about with Citizen Vince, when I began to see this kind of movement of the character and the way the language and everything would reveal this movement that would take you to this place where you would have a feeling of completion. The plot of that story is inseparable from a kind of motion in which Vince lives in this town. He’s afraid someone has been sent to kill him from New York. So he goes to New York, where he’s assigned to kill the guy he thinks came to kill him. I love that movement. 

LYNAUGH 

In the plot of Citizen Vince, toward the end, there’s a withholding of Vince’s plan. Did you worry about that being too “devicey”? 

WALTER 

I love device. When that comes about is when we go in Reagan and  Carter’s heads, the day that Vince comes home. If I’m showing those scenes, he’s on an airplane, he’s thinking, Holy crap, now I gotta go kill this guy. Or maybe I won’t. I’ve got a big decision. It would have been so static. The book is third person and there are plenty of other times in which you don’t exactly know what Vince is up to. You don’t exactly know what he’s doing at that card game until he tells Gotti why he’s there. So if it was the first time it had come up, it would have felt far more “devicey” and I probably would have been too embarrassed to do it. But instead, we’re looking at Carter and Reagan, who are doing a sort of thematic dance around what this novel is about, the idea of shadows following each other, and when we get back to Vince, he’s taking action and his thoughts are in the moment. 

GABE EHRNWALD 

Some readers might feel there’s a kind of withholding in terms of the vote. 

WALTER 

Who he votes for? Maybe because I initially saw this as a screenplay,  I thought of that scene as a camera shot, like the famous tracking shot in Citizen Kane in which the camera rises and rises and rises. It’s one of the longest shots in history. It rises completely out of where Kane is speaking. And so I imagined that same shot when Vince is voting, that you’d be centered over him and you’d be seeing the ballot the way he does and then all of a sudden, the camera rises and rises and rises so you could see the act of voting but you could never see who he voted for. I  really did imagine that I turned my head when Vince voted and gave him the same privacy we all get. 

LIGON 

What does it do for the novel that the reader doesn’t know? 

WALTER

If it was just a novel about a guy who became a Republican or Democrat, what would that be worth? It’s about a guy who chooses as his point of redemption, his symbolic redemption, the process of voting,  which is a really corny thing, and I knew it was corny the minute I thought of it. Am I really going to write a civic thriller? That’s what it is, a kind of civic thriller, but no one else gets to choose what our own symbols of redemption are. And for Vince, voting is meaningful. On the most basic level, not telling the reader who he votes for connects with a theme of the book, that it’s about this person choosing this thing we all take for granted and maybe see as empty or corny or whatever it is, and around that creating a new identity and allowing himself to change. 

LYNAUGH

Can you talk about other devices you’ve used? 

WALTER

Fiction writing can feel kind of meek sometimes, and if we’re going to run from device, if we’re going to run from things like that, it’s going to stay meek. Your job is to engage the reader. Sometimes to fool them awhile, sometimes to suspend something that you don’t want them to know for a while. Sometimes it’s to have the action interrupted by an end dash and not tell the reader what happened. Sometimes it’s to write something in the first person. There are all different kinds of tools and techniques and I don’t know what makes them devices. But I like to be playful, and I like inventive styles of writing.

The book that nailed me the hardest in the last few years was David  Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which is a Russian nesting doll of a book. It’s a  device at its very genetic core and I was thrilled reading it. I loved to see what could be accomplished. 

I don’t have some bag of devices. But I certainly am constantly looking for something inventive to do with structure, with voice, with all of those elemental pieces of writing that combine to make the whole. So it might be a large structural thing. It might be a voice thing. It might be something that feels as “devicey” as having the action break at midpoint in The Zero and then having the character discover alongside the reader what’s missing. Which feels more blatantly “devicey,” but opens up the thing in a way that you wouldn’t have gotten if you’d written the novel straight. I think those kinds of formal inventions and devices and gimmicks can sometimes lead you to a place to discover not only what’s possible with the language and the sentences and paragraphs, but also what your story is about, what brought you to this. For me, when it works the way it did in The Zero, there’s not a lot of distance between the formal playfulness and the thematic drive that made me want to do it in the first place. 

LIGON 

Why is withholding important to fiction? Can withholding ever become cheap? 

WALTER 

A lot of times, what makes something work is what isn’t there. We know that with language, we know that with character, so why wouldn’t it be the same with story? Why wouldn’t the things that you choose not to put in be those things that kind of open the piece up? 

When is it cheap? When you’re honestly assessing your own work and you worry about things, what I worry about is that I’ll sell the farm for a cheap gimmick. One of my favorite novels is Martin Amis’  Time’s Arrow, which occurs in reverse. It’s all gimmick. Does it work?  Depends on the reader, but I love the inventiveness of it. And Martin  Amis referred to that book in The Information, which is another great novel. In The Information, the novel that the protagonist has just written makes people nauseous and causes them to have strokes. Amis is writing about Time’s Arrow and people’s reaction to it. 

You know your weaknesses and strengths as a writer, so I’m probably the worst person in the world to ask when a device becomes cheap, when it overwhelms the thing it’s working on, because I tend to like those.  Maybe it’s because I read a great deal and I’m looking for something new and different. But I also think it goes back to the fact that I’m most interested in the elemental things, finding out what exactly makes voice,  and then the large things, almost like a scientist. Science is interested in the very tiny and the huge, the universe and the subatomic. So I think that my concern with structure, with the fullness of things, makes me more prone to like those sorts of innovations. 

VESTAL

What are the similarities or differences between the Spokane in your books and the real one? Or have you set out to capture the “real” Spokane? 

WALTER

I don’t know if William Kennedy said, “I’m going to capture  Albany.” You just tell those handful of stories that strike you, and then later, if they end up creating a full sense of a place, I can’t imagine it being anything more than accidental at best, because I never set out to create Spokane. I was a crime reporter, so I think I’ve probably created a much more downtrodden, crime-ridden, nasty-ass place than really exists, and yet, I think it’s a very real version of some of those places,  too. The Financial Lives of the Poets is set anywhere, and yet to me, it’s so clearly Spokane. People write to me and say, “I think that 7-11 is right by my house! I live in Santa Monica.” “I think that 7-11 is right across  the street, except it’s a Piggly Wiggly here.” So I think there’s probably something universal in what I’m envisioning as Spokane in that book. 

VESTAL 

Vince makes a brief cameo—uncredited as Vince—in The Financial  Lives of the Poets, and it made me wonder if you had a sort of vision of a kind of world behind the immediately present world. Or a kind of network. 

WALTER 

I think I do, and I think every author kind of does. I don’t mind those things overlapping a little, but in no way do I think of that as some definitive portrait of the city. It’s just the terrain that I happen to be writing about. Usually when I’m done with a book—I don’t, for instance,  wonder if anything else happened to Brian Remy from The Zero. Maybe  Carolyn Mabry from my first two novels, I think there might be more to talk about there, but for the most part, I don’t feel like characters deserve a second novel. And though some of my characters have reoccurred,  they’ve been fringe characters. I think it’s another kind of playfulness that made me sneak Vince in there. And the fact that I don’t call him  Vince—because at the end of Citizen Vince he’s sort of gone back and claimed his early identity, which is Marty. But I also liked the wink at myself that ninety-nine percent of readers won’t get. When people do  discover it, though—again, we talked about withholding—there’s a kind  of withholding. I could have easily made it Vince and made it clear, but  when people get it, it’s like this special thing between me and the couple of readers who have noticed it. 

LIGON

Does your fiction get anything from the place—Spokane—that it wouldn’t get from a different town, like Tallahassee or Des Moines or  Providence? 

WALTER

I think Spokane is one of the most isolated cities of its size in the  United States, and that its isolation casts a lot of different shadows. I  think there’s a sense of isolation here that’s great for fiction. And yet the place doesn’t have an accent. It doesn’t have a special ethnicity. It’s a really general place, but hours from anywhere, which gives it a kind of lab quality. As if you could have any kind of experiment here that you wanted. There’s a lot of film work here now because it has that quality—it could be anywhere. So I think yes and no. Spokane could be  Des Moines. It could be Providence. It could be the Lower East Side in certain ways, and yet, I think its isolation allows a lot of different things to happen. In thrillers, you’re constantly trying to get your hero alone,  and if you think about it, cops always travel in at least twos, sometimes twelves, and yet, you’ve got to get to a point where your protagonist is alone facing whatever he or she is facing. I think that the isolation from the rest of the world that Spokane has creates story possibilities. You can have guys from the Witness Protection Program show up here and have everything they need. It’s kind of self-contained. Most cities of two or three hundred thousand are not self-contained. Most are outside bigger cities and this is like Pluto. I guess Pluto isn’t a planet anymore.  It’s like Neptune, a small, distant planet. It doesn’t have moons. It’s in its own orbit. 

EHRNWALD

What’s the difference between writing a screenplay and writing a  novel? 

WALTER 

Screenwriting is so collaborative. It’s not the writer’s medium. It’s a director’s medium and an actor’s medium. So that’s the first thing,  the collaboration. Also, form is so important and so is economy. Form and economy are the two things you’re constantly battling, and I sort of equate the formal restrictions to poetry, not that I’m much of a poet myself. But I’ll start writing a poem and it’ll turn into prose because I can’t master the economy or the form. I’ve said before that scripts tend to be more external, more action-driven. They don’t have to be. You can have a voice-driven script. You can have My Dinner with Andre, all dialogue.  So it doesn’t have to have action. You could have 110 pages of voice-over. It could all be internal. Didn’t they make Johnny Got His Gun into a movie? I think they did, which takes place entirely inside the mind of someone who has been maimed in battle and is unable to communicate with the outside world. Then it’s done through flashback; you still have to show something on the screen. But practically, they couldn’t be more different forms. I like both. Screenwriting I just don’t take as seriously. I  don’t think it’s as hard. I don’t think it’s as interesting. I don’t think it’s as rewarding. I think because it takes someone to animate it and make it live that it is beyond my understanding. I can’t imagine ever being fully satisfied with a screenplay. I like fiction better, as a reader and a  writer. I like the process of reading a novel far more than seeing a film. 

Because my own fiction has flirted with being adapted and made,  I’ve had to kind of come up with a mental divorce between a film and the source material—because they are totally different things. One Flew  Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of my favorite novels and one of my favorite films, and they are not the same thing at all. You can’t get that paranoia from the book in the movie. You can’t get the walls, the machinery behind the walls from the novel into the film. You couldn’t get Jack Nicholson into the novel and you shouldn’t try. You couldn’t get Danny DeVito as Martini. Those things are animated by actors. 

VESTAL 

Were there any trends that you noticed as a judge for the 2008  National Book Award? 

WALTER 

Another judge told me, “You’ll be stunned by how many good  books you read and how few great ones.” And I think that’s probably true of any year you judge. There’s a ton of very good fiction out there,  but I finished most of the books with some sense of their failing. And their failing was not necessarily the author’s fault. The thing that comes to every writer as they start to finish something is that they’ve begun an imperfect journey. I don’t think any book is perfect and sometimes things are more interesting because of the imperfections. 

The other thing you’ll hear people say sometimes: “Why isn’t anyone  writing realism?” or, “Why did postmodernism die?” or, “Why isn’t  anyone doing this or that?” And the thing I realized is that everyone is doing everything. I found examples of every literary trend you could imagine. Are we finding our way to those books? Are publishers getting behind those books? Are those books reaching wider audiences? No. But someone was trying almost everything. There were some small things that I noticed, like books with titled chapters. There were a lot of linked story collections. It’s hard to tell what’s driven by the writers and what’s driven by the marketplace, such as it exists. It may be publishers saying,  “We need more linked stories.” The collections that I thought worked best, though, often weren’t linked. Those collections that were linked  felt like bland novels or you’d make a game of saying, “All right, which  story did they write to try to link this together?” 

VESTAL

A lot of your work involves an individual with some kind of fraught relationship with a system. Did your work on Ruby Ridge in any way set that course?

WALTER

I think my whole life as a reporter was geared toward seeing how systems fail us. You look at the systems we love—just the people at this table—we love universities and they’re in a kind of spiral of failure right now that is epic in scale. We love newspapers and they’re dying out from under us. We love literature and it’s not healthy at all. I love movies and that system’s falling apart. It isn’t just the criminal justice system, it isn’t just the government. The kind of systems that we create to take care of us and to take care of the things we care about and love always break down and fail, almost inevitably. You build the machine and the machine is going to fall apart. The thing I always go back to in my fiction is that these systems, in a way, don’t even exist. They’re powered by people’s insecurities, emotions, greed. One example is New  York politics. It’s a huge interworking system of all of these different elements, and yet my experience of it was Rudolph Giuliani, who had a  kind of Mussolini-like desire for power and acclaim, and Bernard Kerik,  who was a figure destined to implode because of his own appetites,  weaknesses, and frailties. And the O.J. Simpson murder case, which  I saw kind of secondhand, coming into the wreckage afterward, was all about the failings of people, or the way human frailty causes these systems to break down. 

There’s a relationship between a jury and the judge and lawyers that approaches Stockholm Syndrome or one of those syndromes. Gerry  Spence, in Ruby Ridge, was brilliant at playing juries. He would do everything but crawl in the box with them. “You and I all know that this  case is insane….” The most brilliant thing that he did in that case—the prosecution put up all of these rifles. All the Weavers’ guns were on this  big pegboard. It was daunting, all these guns. At one point, Spence just strode up there and yanked a gun off and sighted it and then handed it through the jury box. The prosecution objected, and Spence said,  “Your Honor, they put them up here. I just wanted the jury to get a  closer look.” Knowing that an Idaho jury—everyone’s sighted a rifle at some point. So now these rifles aren’t things on a wall. You’d see jurors  looking around the courtroom with rifles, and the prosecution going,  “Oh shit, we just lost the case.” That was the kind of thing that went on in the Simpson case, too. 

I find the anti-government furor today fascinating in so many ways.  Because there is no government. It’s us. And in Every Knee Shall Bow,  that was the thing I sort of tried to pull back the curtain from. White separatism was another kind of system. Systems don’t battle. It’s the people within them. 

LIGON

Do you see common attributes in your characters? Can you look at  your characters and say, “I recognize this character as having this kind of  moral code or that set of beliefs, or being stuck in this system?” 

WALTER 

It’s one of those things that can freeze you up if you spend too much time thinking about it. My characters can be wiseasses. They can be a  little lost, a little out of step with everything going on around them.  But that also allows them to be more observant of paradoxes and ironies and of those moments in which the things that we strive for, and the things that we do, don’t connect. Or, to go back to systems, the things that the system’s supposed to do and what it actually does don’t align. 

I think the kind of character I’m drawn to is someone who sees the cracks that other people don’t see, Brian Remy in The Zero being one example—he’s the only one aware of his own condition, which he comes to believe the rest of the world shares but just doesn’t recognize.  I think the characters’ awareness of the absurdities around them is the main thing. And then there are obviously some surface things—that they don’t sleep, they’ve all lost an eye, they probably order the same drinks.  They riff the way I like to riff. I love Marilynne Robinson’s answer when  someone asked her if any of her characters were her and she said, “Oh,  yes, all of them.” I think there’s that sense when you create these people that they’re extensions, hopefully not only of you, but partly of you. 

LIGON

You talked about fragmentation in Over Tumbled Graves, but there was a different kind of fragmentation in The Zero. Did that fragmentation come early for you in the writing? 

WALTER

I had written a short story years ago called “Flashers, Floaters, and  Vitreous Detachment.” In that story, there was an insane person who saw streaks and lines and believed the streaks and lines were connecting people and buildings and ideas and things. I had that piece just sitting there forever. When I was at Ground Zero, we kept not finding bodies.  We kept thinking we were going to find more bodies and we kept not finding them. The idea that these people were just gone, that they had been atomized, was hard to get your mind around. I kept thinking about that Maltese Falcon idea of disappearing and starting your life over. So I  started mulling a novel about someone who disappears and starts life over. 

More than any of the other books, that was a thematic book. There were all these things I wanted to say about the culture, about the way we reacted to September 11th, about the leadership at Ground Zero, about all those things that were bubbling around, and yet I couldn’t quite ever complete those thoughts. I couldn’t get my mind around what it was  I was trying to say to myself. And I thought, If I wait for this, I will never get there. I sort of transferred my own confusion and inability to track and process to the character. And that felt right. I can’t remember the first time I wrote one of those sentences where I just ended it with a dash, but oh my God, it was the most freeing thing, realizing that you don’t have to write those transitions. Transitions suck. Transitions are almost always forced. Or if they’re not, then they take you—they transition—to a place you don’t want to go. 

I had done some screenwriting at that point, and there’s an old saw in screenwriting that you want to begin a scene as late as possible and end it as soon as possible. And I thought, What if I end the scene way before anyone even knows what the scene is about? The freedom of that was a great discovery once I realized I could just bail out of scenes any time I wanted. Sometimes, the scene would accomplish what I thought it was going to, and other times, it would just hang there, a complete fragment. I was aware, all along, of the larger story I was telling, but the fragmentation kept it so fresh for me, because I was never sure how  much of it I was going to reveal. I had almost two versions of the story.  I had the full story, and I had this fragmented version I was telling. It made me a little crazy as a writer to be walking around with this kind of insane story that I’m telling myself in my head. 

LIGON

And that book was also about systems—

WALTER

Part of it is that I’m writing in 2003 and we’re all gung ho to get into  Iraq, and I’m writing a book that when I showed my wife, she said, “I  think you’ll go to jail for this.” And my agent said, “I don’t think I can  represent this book.” But I couldn’t stop working on it. 

I went back to Kafka and kept drawing in my mind these lines between Kafka’s systems and the kind of overarching sense in Kafka’s work that the state is bearing down on him, on the individual. And in  my mind, this was worse, because we were culpable. We were the system that was bearing down on us. We had a part in it by our inaction, by the fact that we kept electing George W. Bush. We were culpable in the surreal nature of our response to this action. We all knew that we weren’t really going to war because Iraq had gotten yellowcake uranium. We  knew that wasn’t the reason. We just wanted to kick some ass. Maybe some of us put little “no war” signs in our windows. And I felt a little  bit…I felt as if we’d all gone insane, as if the whole culture had gone  a little bit insane. Maybe some of us were only a little insane, but it felt like such a big, important thing to be working on and writing and saying. And from a writer’s standpoint, it was thrilling to be dangling  these scenes, and to be sort of nakedly saying things that I, as a younger  writer, would not have had the courage to even try to say.

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Lydia Millet discovered that she loved the desert when she attended the University of Arizona’s MFA program. And though she didn’t stay in the program, she returned to live in the desert a decade later—a wild, expansive setting fitting for both her fiction and her environmental advocacy. Millet is the author of six novels and, most recently, a collection of short stories, Love in Infant Monkeys, which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA award for fiction, and embodies her interest in what she calls an “agenda of empathy” through the perspective of a grudgeless woman who has experienced a life full of misfortune and abuse.

Born in Boston and raised in Toronto, Millet lived in both Los Angeles and New York City before settling outside of Tucson. Her fiction deals with subjects as diverse as extinction, the creation of the atomic bomb, and celebrity worship, and shares a commitment to cultural investigation that is by turns serious and satirical.

In an interview with Eclectica Magazine, Millet described the condition with which her characters grapple as follows: “It seems to me that adult lives are not chiefly lives of discovery but of calcification and sedimentation: we become more rigid and we become more passive, buried in the sand that blows over us… And rarely, punctuating these long plateaus of sameness and non-learning, there are moments of rapture. In such moments we feel how near we are to touching truth, but how far away truth is, and how always and forever it will hover there beyond our reach… Many of my characters are caught up in moments of rapture and recognition, indeed such moments pop up like jack-in- the-boxes, because what else is worth the price of admission, finally? Myself, I live for those moments.”

We met with Lydia Millet on a shady porch in Spokane last spring, where we discussed imagination, the unsaid, and “the tragedy and glory of our individual selves.”

Samuel Ligon

Do you see yourself as a cultural critic?

Lydia Millet

I think any writer of substance is a cultural critic by nature. Almost any. I think books should have an agenda, but I don’t think you should be able to deliver a one-liner about what that agenda is. It should be an agenda felt by the reader, sensed by the reader, but not fully known. In my work, often there’s a sort of agenda of empathy. Very simple. Empathy is something I’m interested in. But other people have other agendas, a nostalgic agenda, or an agenda that circles the idea of longing. It could be anything. I just want to feel that it’s there, pulsing behind the bones.

Melina Rutter

Is the empathy agenda the same thing you refer to as the macrosocial? You’ve described that as writing that deals with the self in relation to the larger mysteries of the world.

Millet

Not exactly the same. One of the things I react against in contemporary literary fiction is the preoccupation with the personal. Obviously, it’s hard to define “personal” against “individual” or “the self.” But so much literary fiction seems to dwell singularly in the domain of the personal, the doings of the person, the social life of the person, the personal life of the person. And I find it very limiting. I’m not interested, finally, in just the personal. I’m interested in the relationship of the individual self to society and the social self, and morality, in fact, to use an old-fashioned word. Those connections are what I’m interested in exploring. But macrosocial can also be in the same vein as macroeconomics versus microeconomics, meaning larger systems or structures of the social. Government, for instance.

Ligon

Should fiction be interested in those kinds of systems?

Millet

Absolutely. It can be very covert, that interest, but I think it needs to be there. We’re a culture that’s dooming itself to navel-gazing, and has for a long time, and I don’t think that’s done us any favors. That’s not to say that navel-gazing doesn’t exist elsewhere, but I do think that we, as Americans, are in this crevasse of our own making in terms of the way we’ve allowed the apotheosis of self to dominate our thinking about the world, and I think it’s always a job of art to make us look at ourselves critically. Whether we do so overtly or covertly.

I’m not interested in polemics. Polemics are horrible to read. Even if a piece is satirical, if it’s sheer polemic, it doesn’t work as art. It doesn’t allow any space for the reader. I wrote some polemics when I was young. I wrote this terrible book called Parts and Services, which was a feminist screed, basically, against men. Every chapter was a part of a woman’s body. It was dreadful. Luckily, there are no extant copies of this monstrosity. But I started writing from that youthful angst-ridden passion about the injustice of the world, and then I moved away from that when I learned how to create something I was actually interested in. I have to be interested in what I’m doing, and any kind of polemic just shuts me out, someone else’s polemic or my own. The polemic kills imagination, essentially. Because it’s foregone. It’s already decided. There’s nothing in there that we’re helping to decide; there’s nothing we’re making in a polemic.

Ligon

What prose interests you?

Millet

I was asked recently whether I considered my taste to be minimalist in prose, and I never thought of myself that way, but I do like a lot of space on the page. That is to say, not actual physical white space, but I like there to be space, as with, say, some Nabokov, where there’s a lot of metaphysical space that’s somehow created by the language. I don’t like to be overwhelmed with words. I don’t want someone to try to do some “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” with their verbiage. I want there to be room for the silence of the mind in the reading.

Ligon

How does that manifest itself?

Millet

I don’t know the answer to that. It’s a sort of magic. It’s not that I want sentences to be small. It might have to do with the way time passes, narrative time and reading time, and how they work together. Pacing has something to do with it, a certain economy of language, which would be aspired to by Carver-ites. I don’t want any flashy tricks. I want there to be contemplation in the world of the story. But as to how that’s achieved technically, I think there are myriad ways, untold numbers of ways. So it’s not that I’m looking for a certain technique or formula or anything in the work, or even a series of tropes.

Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian, is one of my favorite writers, and my favorite book of his is Woodcutters. All of his books are about some version of himself, and he’s very bitter, he hates the world, but also hates himself, and he has these long internal monologues of—because he wrote in German—these run-on sentences. It’s very interior, and very judgmental of culture. He hated Austrian culture with a vengeance, which was his own culture, the culture of Vienna. But it’s not without humor. Part of the space I’m talking about prose generating has to do with humor. There should be a lightness. A book that does this well is
J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. It’s perfectly spaced for the reader. It perfectly generates a world of thought and moment. I like books where the unutterable and the ineffable are lurking behind everything, where you approach the unsaid consistently in some way throughout the book. I like the unspeakable.

Ligon

You mentioned time. Is fiction always about time?

Millet

Always. But stories also help us to situate ourselves outside it, or to feel that we have. Obviously, there is no situating ourselves outside of time, but the illusion of being outside of time is exhilarating. It always seems like you could live your life in a movie, or in a book you love, a charismatic book. What if you had a score for everything you did? What if there was always music playing? What if there was always momentum, and always the shifting of landscapes, and you were that hero. It’s romantic, and I think all of us love the romantic, whether or not we admit it.

Ligon

But poetry isn’t always concerned with time as fiction seems to be.

Millet

There is a stop-time thing with poetry. But still, within a poem there has to be an expression of time. I think it’s a different relationship to time, but I’m not sure there’s not a concern with time in poetry. Because I think there always has to be time where careful language is concerned. There’s always time that we’re responding to and time we’re invoking in our sentences. I don’t think it’s a non-time with poems.

Rutter

Is music a non-time?

Millet

No. Music is all about time.

Rutter

You can take a piece of music out of context, like what you said about having a score to your life, or to a movie. You can take music out of context and impose it somewhere else.

Millet

Of all the arts, music is the best at allowing us access to the present, I think. And whether that has to do with neurology, neurolinguistics, whether it has to do with the way that blood cycles through our bodies, I don’t know, but the rhythm and the power of music is, I think, in allowing us to live in the present in this particular, unique way that is remarkable. If I could, I would be a great musician.

Rutter

I was reading your essay about the Mekons.

Millet

I love those damn Mekons.

Rutter

In an interview you talked about rapture. Is the moment you describe in the essay—at the Mekons show—how you would define rapture?

Millet

You know when you’re at a music event, and you’re dancing around, or maybe you’re not, maybe you’re just still, and you’re loving with this deep love that you can feel for music? I think at those times I’m more aware of myself in space and the rest of the world than at many other times. It’s extraordinary. Music has that great power to make you want to be nowhere but there, at that moment. I don’t think fiction works that way. You can love a book and be deeply immersed in a book, and want to remain with the book, and you should, if it’s a good book. But it’s not the same. It’s in this sort of past time of the book. You’re in the world of the book, this already completed world, into which you’re injecting yourself, of course, in a changeable, mutable way. But it’s not the same as listening to a piece of music.

Rutter

And it’s not collective. It seems like that might have something to do with the feeling of rapture.

Millet

Definitely. It’s an idea of communion. It’s like a religious sort of ecstasy, I think. Folks who are involved in those sorts of ecstatic religions, they’re involved also in going to a Mekons concert, or whatever the brew of choice is.

Rutter

In your book, My Happy Life, when the narrator experiences what I thought of as rapture, it seemed to come out of feeling connected to someone else, for better or worse.

Millet

I do think that’s where empathy lies, in this recognition of the self and its relation to the not-self, to the community, to the species, another species, to beingness. It’s the pain of being individual selves, of being isolate. And yet, of course, our greatest gifts live in that selfhood also. Our greatest capacity. The privacy of our minds is such a glorious thing. Yet we’re social beings always straining for communion. And for me, much of the tension of my fiction, or the project of it, lies around that subtragedy of our individual selves, which is also our glory.

Laura Ender

How does the “pain of being individual selves” play a role in your work? The narrator of My Happy Life, for example, seems to experience rapture when she’s in physical pain, usually at the hands of others.

Millet

Her gift in this book, the gift that I wanted to give her, was the gift of being fully expressed and in commerce with other souls, which is clearly a fictional conceit. When I sat down to write that book, I think I was just turning thirty, and I was moving away from judgment as a main practice that defined my artistic life and world. When I lived in New York in my twenties, it seemed that my friends and I were always going to parties, and this also applied to our reading, and our choosing of what art we liked. Our practice was to go to these parties and separate ourselves and look at all the things we didn’t like, and all the people we didn’t like, criticize people for what they weren’t, or what they were. This was the way we defined our taste. As I grew older, I became more interested in—well, I’m still highly judgmental, but I became more interested in defining myself by what I loved. And by love in general, by love of the world and its denizens rather than by criticism of it. So I wrote this book as a gesture for myself. Could I write a character who was unlike myself in this extreme fashion, in this fashion of living an un-judging life? And, also, what would the tragedy of that look like? What would the sadness of that look like? Because I believe we should, in many cases, be more judgmental, actually, as a culture. So it wasn’t that I was simply creating a utopian character. It was that I wanted to look at the practical reality of a self who fails to criticize the society in which he or she lives.

Ender

Is violence important to that point?

Millet

Yeah, and that’s why the events in that book had to be extreme, any of the various torture episodes. I didn’t wish to linger on them, and I don’t think I did linger. It’s not a graphic mayhem that’s occurring, because I had no interest in that. It’s a form of voyeurism, but I wanted to establish the parameters of her servitude in ways that were fairly extreme as a backdrop. You couldn’t play such a character off anything that was less than extreme. Or I couldn’t.

Ender

You use violence in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love and in Omnivores. Do you think violence is important to fiction?

Millet

I think of myself as tending away from reading violence, as being less interested. We get so much of it in other places that I never think of fiction as the locus of that. So I guess I’m more interested in references to violence than descriptions of violence. Most of my violent scenes, when you read them line to line, are not graphically violent. They just state that a violent event has occurred. For example, there’s a scene in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love where she’s sort of raped, you know, but you don’t actually see the details of that. You don’t see any physicality of it. We’re already deluged by so many images of violence that they’re sort of throwaways now, and they’re everywhere, in every procedural that comes on TV. They’re so everywhere that they’re formulaic, and so I think a reference is really all that’s required to invoke the feeling of that.

But I also don’t see much of a need for landscape descriptions in fiction. There’s a lot I don’t see a need for or am not interested in prosecuting in fiction. Most physical description I’m not interested in. I like it when other people do it well, as long as they don’t linger, but I’ve never been very… you’d be hard pressed to say where any one of my characters is situated on a given page. I mean, where are they in the world? It’s not clear. What does their world look like? That’s all for the reader to make. I’m just not interested in lengthy textual exploration of physicality in general, I guess.

Rutter

Do you think that human/animal relationships in literature have been romanticized?

Millet

That’s a broad question. What are your thoughts on it?

Rutter

There seems to be an archetype of the human/animal relationship in literature: the man going out in the wilderness to conquer the beast and show his dominion over nature.

Ender

Like The Old Man and the Sea.

Millet

Or Moby-Dick. There certainly is that sort of predator/prey dynamic in a lot of earlier American literature.

Rutter

And there’s something different going on in your work.

Millet

You should read Joy Williams’s essay collection, Ill Nature. The hunting piece, “The Killing Game,” is a polemic, but she’s someone who can do that in an essay better than anyone I know. It has this moral weight to it that’s just brilliant.

I guess what I find more in contemporary American fiction is a rejection of the world of the non-domesticated animal. Pets don’t really count. There are plenty of dog-obsessed people. I’m a dog-obsessed person. But there’s a rejection of the whole nonurban world, and even the urban nature world. At the same time, there is sometimes this fetishization of the animal, you know, obscure bits of natural history that people cling to, or just the symbolic weight of animal morphology, like the beauty of animals, that does make an appearance in much contemporary fiction, but is not to be dwelt upon. More in an almost nostalgic way, as though the animal is already gone. As though these things are not somehow relevant. The wild animal as pet, I think, appears in contemporary fiction, but it’s difficult to cite my references here.

I also think that animals are extraordinarily difficult to write about. And can be boring to read about. Because they are other. They don’t have dialogue. There’s contemporary fiction that does deal with animal subjectivity, for example Barbara Gowdy’s book, The White Bone, which is written from the point of view of the elephants. Or there’s that quasi- commercial pop fiction, the guy with the tiger on the raft. Life of Pi. So there are attempts. Gowdy’s a Canadian writer who’s not probably known enough in the U.S. Her book is strange—very ambitious and sort of a misfire, cringe-inducing at times. Because it’s really hard to write well from the point of view of an elephant, a difficult project. Few are more difficult, I think. So there are some things like that in contemporary fiction. But I think that the project of entering animal subjectivity is just immense and undoable.

What’s more interesting is the attempt to explore how animals aren’t us, and how different we are, you know, just the fact of embracing the unknowableness of the animal, and wanting that always to persist in culture, to be there. Even the most urban among us would feel impoverished in a world without animals and without trees. We may not be prone to hiking or whatever, but we live in the knowledge that somewhere in our land there is the wild. We don’t want to live in a world where that doesn’t exist. Yet we don’t talk about this very much. And it’s ceasing to exist more every day. There’s very little outcry about this. It’s problematic, for me. The intersection of environmental advocacy culture and literary culture has always been very—there almost is none, for one thing. And when it does happen, it’s odd, because I don’t typically love so-called nature writing. I don’t do a lot of reading in that area. I do like Barry Lopez, his nonfiction. But I’m bored by a lot of writing that is more pastoralist.

And the whole style and aesthetic of the environmental movement, in which I’m immersed to some degree—because I work in it and my husband is an environmentalist, and my graduate degree was in the field—but it’s not a culture where I feel at home at all, because I don’t like the aesthetics of it, and I don’t like the single-mindedness of it. There are two sides of it now in America. There’s the kind of granola-ey, more grassroots-y culture of it, and then there’s the national-environmental- group-super-corporate culture of it, which is full of lawyers. And I’ve worked in both. When I lived in New York, I worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council for three years, and wrote grants for them, so I’ve seen both of these arenas, and I don’t like either. The people in them don’t—and there are exceptions to this—but they don’t read literature at all. In many cases, the art that is gravitated toward by enviros is just not of the first order to me.

My husband is a rare exception to this, a voracious reader of poetry, with an almost-PhD in phenomenology, so he’s philosophical and he’s a theory head, more erudite than I am by far; and he also loves art. But he’s so rare. I mean, people in that world just aren’t interested in the books that I love and revere. On the other side, my literary friends have very limited interest in environmentalism, which is an awkward and uncharismatic word anyway, not one that sufficiently illuminates the nature of these matters—we’re talking about a range of things having to do with human life support, quality of life, and the ontological reality of the world, so I don’t like the term environment or environmentalism. But that said, most of my literary friends see a certain tediousness in the strivings of that subculture. I understand in a way, because the aesthetics of environmentalism are so limited and unfortunately passé, but the refusal of the U.S. intelligentsia to engage in these sorts of social issues, beyond just a passing acquaintance with them, is tragic. And it’s greatly exacerbated here, compared to say Latin America, where there’s a more well-rounded relationship to social problems and art, where these things are more interlinked.
I think we have a culture that refuses to confront itself in honest and powerful terms. It’s partly the ironic gesture, the supremacy of the ironic, which in the wake of 9/11 was dismissed by various idiotic critics. Irony certainly has not disappeared, nor should it, but I do think there’s a distance between the literary subculture and the subculture of advocacy that wants to say, quite rationally and urgently—because given what the science says about climate change, we don’t have much time at all—“Look. We have serious problems, and we need to pay attention to them if we want our grandchildren to live in a bearable world.”

Ligon

I wonder if there’s a rejection of the human in the environmental community—a focus on the fact that humans destroy—and what’s valued is the pristine, where humans aren’t. There seems to be a rejection of the human, which, as a fiction writer, is one of your primary concerns.

Millet

There is a reaction to anthropocentrism in that community that rejects the human and the human-preoccupied. But I don’t think it’s calculated. I think it’s more a sort of thoughtless rejection of maybe an urban sort of elite, a certain kind of materialism. I do believe there’s a better way to do that, that it’s possible and in fact necessary to reject the centrally human without rejecting the human. I’m interested in our foibles and our beauties as a species. This doesn’t make me any less interested in the rest of the world; indeed it makes me more interested in the rest of the world.

We’ve got all these false dichotomies in the culture, like the dichotomy between creationism and evolutionary biology—Darwinism and creationism. This whole idea that you can’t have God if you have evolution is so obviously specious. It’s just unreasoned and specious, and yet has become this leviathan in culture, that these things are at war with each other. It seems like category errors are made all over the place. I’d like to see a world where the literary folks were more interested in extra-literary concerns, and where activists—and not just environmental activists—were more interested in the arts. And also, if more scientists were interested in the arts… I read lots of stuff about popular science, but I don’t know a lot of scientists who read literature. There are some, don’t get me wrong, but it just seems like we so tragically undervalue art and literary art.

Ligon

Are we too specialized? Is that the problem?

Millet

I do think there’s extreme specialization, but there’s no intrinsic reason that the specialty has to close out the rest of the world.

Ligon

Was this less true fifty years ago, a hundred years ago?

Millet

Certainly a hundred years ago. What happened is just capitalism, I think. Extreme postindustrial capitalism. Competition is everything. Everything is a competition, and if you have to excel in a particular skill—like if you’re a shot-put thrower, you’re taught not to pay attention to the whole rest of the track and field world. We actually make a feast of this. It’s all that we do, this notion of excellence, wanting our children to excel, wanting ourselves to excel, which means focus on one thing to the detriment of the rest of existence or experience. A return to the Renaissance man would be great, and the Renaissance woman.

Ligon

Does your work ask us to reconsider the human relationship to animals or nature?

Millet

I hope it does. I almost always set my people in urban environments, in particular L.A. Generally, I’m not environment-specific, but L.A. looms large in my writing, because I think it’s sort of the ultra-America, an exaggeration of America. Or a perfection of American exaggeration. But also, I would find it boring to have my people constantly gamboling in nature. There’s no doubt that we’re urbanized and urbanizing more all the time. I think we should all go more to the woods, or the beach, more to the ocean, to the river, to the desert, but I’m not interested in situating my fiction there. Individual animals have always been more compelling to me; their charisma is more interesting as a subject of fiction. I think it’s difficult to write compellingly about trees. John Fowles did it, but I can’t.

Ligon

Did you have an experience that caused you to reevaluate your relationship to animals?

Millet

It wasn’t any particular moment, really. It was when I left Manhattan and moved to the desert outside Tucson. This was in January of 1999. I lived in an apartment in the West Village with my then boyfriend, but I had loved the desert since I first went there a decade earlier and briefly attended the University of Arizona—my brief foray into an MFA program. So I went back to live there part-time, like four months a year, and then a week after I got there, I bought the house I now live in. My boyfriend wasn’t too happy about that, because he didn’t want to live in the desert. But coming to that desert, I realized that the sky was so huge, and it was the only place I’d ever felt all right about dying in. I realized, here is where I can be comfortable with death, with the idea of my own mortality. Because here the world is so beautiful, that to be a part of it, even if I’m just dead, is all right with me. I’d always hated the idea of growing old in New York and hobbling along those cold sidewalks in my old age, even though I’d only lived in Manhattan for three years and still love going there. But I realized, this is actually the world. The world is not the places we have built on it. The world is this. And it’s the world that I want to live in, where I can see a million stars at night over my house and animals wander through the yard. So it wasn’t any sort of epiphany, but just going there and realizing I should be there.

Ligon

Recognizing something larger than yourself, or that you were part of?

Millet

No, I’ve always had awe. I had awe at great cities, too. I’ve always lived with awe, but it was actually that I wasn’t a part of it, that I didn’t have to be a part of it, that this world would exist after I did. It would go on and on and on without me, and that’s in My Happy Life. So it wasn’t that I was a part of it; it was that I was not a part of it and didn’t have to be.

Ligon

It seems like Europeans, but especially the British, have attitudes about human relationships to animals that are different than Americans’. For example, we see an animal rights movement in Britain more than in the United States.

Millet

I think that’s true. Of course, Europe has destroyed its own nature long since, for the most part, but I do think they have a more sophisticated relationship to animals in general. I think that has a lot to do with the philosophical underpinnings of our various societies. American pragmatism, materialism, the Methodist sort of John Wesley get rich and richer and richer, all that philosophy that was so crucial to the birth of our country—Puritanism—prepared us for a more objectified relationship to the natural world. Whereas in European philosophy, you know, your Derrida, your sort of continental philosophy, there’s a greater appreciation for and understanding of the nonhuman.

Ender

Are you addressing that in “Sexing the Pheasant” when the character is considering what’s American and what’s English?

Millet

I’ve done that a lot lately, you’re making me recognize, because in the book that is the sequel to How the Dead Dream, called Ghost Lights, and then the third one, called Magnificence—they’re not published yet, but they’re in existence—the protagonist of Ghost Lights is the father of Casey in How the Dead Dream, and he’s an IRS guy. He goes looking for T down in Costa Rica. After he discovers that his wife is cheating on him, he wants to get away, so he invents this expedition to find T, who has disappeared, as in the end of the first book. He meets these Germans there, and he objectifies these Germans, and at the same time adores them. It’s comic, but it’s like the Aryan ideal, and I’m thinking now that I do that a fair amount, just playing off the European.

Ender

Madonna is the main character in “Sexing the Pheasant,” and every story in Love in Infant Monkeys features some sort of celebrity or historical figure, alive or dead. Where does the celebrity end and the character begin?

Millet

Of course I have no idea what Madonna is like personally. I just had my version of an invented Madonna, although I suspect there are certain accurate parallels. I let myself write whatever I wanted to about these living and dead people. You can’t be constrained by fact.

Ligon

The way you used fact in that book reminded me of Don DeLillo with Libra, how you would take characters, and I’m thinking of Harlow, who you reveal as somewhat despicable, and then humanize them. How did fact play into the fiction, or how did you get away from fact?

Millet

I take what I like amongst the facts and play with it. I love despicable characters. I’m fascinated with them. When I read my book Everyone’s Pretty—when I’m forced to read a portion of it—I realize just how harsh that main character is, but I loved him at the time, his wickedness. I love the wicked and the dismissive, and the narcissistic in particular, probably because I find these things in myself, and in other people—but all those terrible parts of our selves exaggerated are just so much fun to play with. I’m very opportunistic, I think, when I write about historical personages or contemporary living individuals. I pick what I want out of the shimmering vision of them that’s ambient in culture, and play my own game with it, and please myself in rendering it in whatever form I see fit for the purpose of the story. I feel little obligation to verisimilitude. So that’s liberating, but I think that’s why I’m a poor candidate for nonfiction. Because it’s very difficult for me to—and I’ve written a few essays, probably enough for a collection now, but only a couple of them are good, I think, and that’s because I’m not very able to situate myself comfortably in a narrative eye that has to reflect my actual self in some genuine form. I have a couple of times, I think, succeeded in that, but it’s hard to reduce yourself. I envy good nonfiction writers that capacity. I think it’s exceptional. Very few do it to my satisfaction, actually. It’s hard to construct a narrative persona in nonfiction that is not repugnant in some way. Because how self-praising do you allow yourself to be, or how self-deprecating, and just what parts of yourself do you choose to represent in nonfiction? It’s such a difficult negotiation, and one I don’t
care to undertake very often.

Rutter

Part of what’s effective about Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is the juxtaposition between straight historical fact and the narrative that the reader is already involved in. How did that structure evolve?

Millet

I did something a little bit like that in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, too, where I had quotes at the beginning of each chapter, often from George Bush himself. I did a lot of primary research for Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. I went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I went to the Nevada test sites, and Los Alamos, and the Trinity Site. I really wanted to ground it, and there was so much that was fascinating about the facts, as they pertained to this piece of history, that I didn’t want to lose them entirely, so I played my obviously fanciful narrative off of that. I think, perhaps, because I did so much research, I simply wanted to inject it into there. I read shelves of books about these men, all the biographical writing about them, and far more than I needed to know about nukes in general, and I think that it was a thing where, for me, the stakes were so high, in terms of what actually happened. And what actually happened had such terrible beauty of its own that I didn’t want to give it short shrift.

Well, the creation might not be beautiful, but the explosions of the bomb are beautiful, ridiculously so. The mushroom cloud is sublime, and I didn’t want my book to exist as a fancy completely divorced from this very heavyweight reality. Also, the nonfiction narrative parts served to anchor portions of the book for me. I don’t know if it completely worked, honestly, because those pieces take you out of the narrative, and are by nature didactic. I feel that of all my books, that is the least technically successful, although some people only like that book. But for me, artistically, it was a harder thing to pull off. Probably because it’s a long book, and I’m not really a long book person. It’s difficult for me to maintain tone over the course of such a long narrative, and those didactic segments also allowed me to release myself from the job of maintaining that tone. But between the hardback and the paperback, I cut 15,000 words. That was how dissatisfied I was.

Rutter

I thought the structure gave variance to the reading experience. I guess it was giving variance to the writing experience, too. The juxtaposition was where I found that metaphysical space you were talking about earlier.

Millet

I hope it does that; I’m not always confident in it. But a curious thing with the reception of that book was that several of the readings I gave attracted physicists from the Manhattan Project who were still alive. Several of them came up to me and told me that they felt my portrayals of the other physicists were not far off. Which was astonishing and perhaps not true, because I don’t think they were the intimates of those physicists, so it may have just been their social projections onto these figures that they had worked with. I don’t know. I don’t entirely believe it, but it was odd for me that they attributed any verisimilitude whatsoever. It remains for me the most realist of my books, and I think that’s why its fans are a discreet segment among my readers, who don’t tend to go as easily into the things that are less earnest.

Ender

Your book covers feature the color pink and babies and pink and more pink. But it seems like you’ve escaped the chick-lit ghetto more than most female writers. What are your thoughts on marketing of contemporary fiction by women?

Millet

For a long time I was angered by what I perceived to be real sexism in the publishing industry, and it absolutely still exists. Now I’m more likely to laugh at it, though the laugh is definitely not your light-hearted, dizzy- with-joy type laugh. It’s more like the laugh of a cackling inmate. But it is purely laughable, the way merely solid writing by men gets anointed as genius with a kind of methodical, institutional urgency. Literary writing by women isn’t pushed or touted as “genius” the way writing by men is. Men, and especially men who write long books, are touted as geniuses at the drop of a hat, frankly. But many women who write with equal or greater brilliance are lucky to get called by lesser names, are never viewed as powerhouses, and are often relegated to the margins. As to chick lit per se, there are so many categories: your urban power-outfit chick lit apparently for grownups, your teen-fiction specimens that groom young girls to be vapid, your middlebrow women’s fiction concerned chiefly with relationships and the home front… and then of course there are numerous serious writers with two X chromosomes who simply get overlooked or dismissed as minor.

Ligon

Alice Munro can write about “women’s” issues, and she doesn’t get pigeon-holed.

Millet

That’s true, but she has much greater austerity and more metaphysical space in her prose than so many writers of both sexes, even though I actually went on record sort of lambasting all of the Alice Munro fans in the world on the front page of The Globe and Mail’s book section. You can’t fault Munro for the work she does, in the sense that she’s technically brilliant and very intelligent and a great writer in some ways—she’s a serious writer, someone I respect—but I do think that domestic microscopy is problematic in literary culture. It’s just that she does it so well, it’s really hard to object to Alice Munro. But I wish there weren’t as many Alice Munro imitators. It’s sort of like Carver. I like Carver. But I wish there weren’t so many Carver-ites….

I once wrote a vicious review of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which would fall into a middle-aged, Hermès-scarf-wearing female-bonding category… I detest that kind of thing. I find it materialistic and status-quo promoting and “let’s all play bridge at the country club.” Or the uber-commercial chick-lit products like the Sex in the City franchise: Let’s all bond by wearing designer clothes. Sex in the City is the equivalent of setting up a huge line dance by lung cancer patients singing a glittering show tune about the fabulousness of their premium-brand cigarettes. Which would at least be funnier. What amazes me is that so many women, some of them actually smart, delude themselves that the Sex in the City line dance, with skinny chicks belting out the praises of their high-heeled shoes, is empowering. That kind of presentation of female bonding is vile to me. Although there’s nothing wrong with female bonding. I practice it in my own life, and I love women, but there’s not much to like in chick-lit culture. It’s a pathetic trivialization of femaleness.

Ender

There’s a lot of biology, zoology, and anthropology in your books.
Would you say writing is a kind of anthropology?

Millet

Anthropology has a way of objectifying the “other,” and fiction also objectifies. You can’t not. Humorous fiction especially is all about objectification; that’s how we’re funny. There’s a kind of distance required for humor, I think, and to achieve that distance, you need to objectify. It’s not always that you’re objectifying a character. You might be objectifying a trend, or an entire people. There are numerous forms of objectification. But it’s almost always in some form of it, I think, that the funniest funny occurs. I think that’s why I seem never able to write a book where there aren’t marginal characters who are severely objectified. In even my gentler books, there are throwaway objectified characters, lampooned caricatures. They’re types, archetypes or stereotypes. And anthropology has this, you know, “white man’s burden” kind of aspect to it, even when it tries to be postmodern, or post-structuralist, when it attempts to say that it’s not doing what it’s doing. It’s still always about this microscopy of the other. I always want, in what I do, to have both objectification and sympathetic identification; I want them to coexist. I think that the tension between those two is interesting in fiction and that some of the best fiction is highly aware of the play between the object and the subject. I think we automatically objectify everywhere we go, all our perceptions; we’re not just meaning-making machines, but specifically objectification-creating machines. We can’t help objectifying others, and to a degree, ourselves, by reducing, categorizing, labeling, naming. All the things that make us who we are, in a great way, also make us compulsive objectifiers.

Ligon

And when we objectify, it means we don’t see the person?

Millet

It means we can’t see without naming. There’s no complete vision of the self or of others, but the way we make sense of the world is to create objects. This book I just blurbed is a 30th anniversary reissue of a famous John Fowles essay called “The Tree.” It’s a beautiful essay about the way we relate to nature, and don’t, and the difference between those among us who are cultivators, and those who just like to look at trees, and what that difference is. At least briefly, he talks about this sort of “thingification” of nature. He doesn’t call it that. I guess reification, though he doesn’t call it that either. But it has to do with a way we can look at something like that ponderosa pine, and as soon as we turn away from it, or even in the looking at it, we have already made of it a thing. There’s a way in which it’s really hard for us to not make totality into things that we then see ourselves seeing as things, if that makes any sense. Let’s say you’re on a hike—and this could be in an urban environment equally, where the trees are the buildings—but you’re walking and you see something, a tree or a house. You’re there with it, but almost as soon as you turn away, it’s already not itself. It’s already something you are bracketing in your own experience as something you have experienced. It’s hard to parse, but I’m interested in that. It’s a form, obviously, of objectifying the world around us, that we seem unable not to perform. We can’t escape it.
But there’s nobility in the struggle to try, I think. Because otherwise, once every being is classified as a thing, we’ve experienced a great loss in understanding, even our attempt to understand ourselves as a part of the world. It’s the difference between art and nature he talks about. Art is something that already is what it is. It’s complete. It’s done. You read a book. It’s what it already was. But nature’s constantly changing, and we find it difficult to interact with, because we can’t rely on it the way we can the things that we’ve created, even if they’re beautiful. We can’t rely on it to remain the same. We can’t “thingify” it entirely. And by nature, I mean the entire world that we live in, that we inhabit, and I’m certainly not the first person to see this, but this sort of alienation that we feel from totalities, I think, has had a pernicious effect on us as a species. We’re dying as we speak. We’re changing, our cells are changing; we’re not art; we’re not made, but being. We’re nature, so we’re also things that can’t be relied upon to remain the same.

Ligon

Are we afraid of that? Is that part of our problem?

Millet

Of course, of course. Because we can never dwell successfully in the present, and that’s part of our tragedy. We’re always creatures of the future or the past. Both of them we feel we control to a greater degree than we do the present. We can’t get a grasp on this. What is this “us” sitting here? We don’t even know what we are because we’re changing as I say this. I already feel different from the way I felt five seconds ago.

I think there’s a great narrative beauty in anthropology, a great charisma in objectification in general. It’s beyond charming to make people into characters and events into stories. It’s compelling. It’s lovely. It’s our way of bringing color into our lives, to create these linear paths for ourselves. We don’t know any other way to exist than by making stories, and that applies to everyone, not just writers. All we can know is a story, and that has to do directly with the fact that we’re not creatures who can fathom the present. The making of things we don’t understand into stories, there always has to be reduction in that. It’s always an act of reduction. And that reduction is so fucking fun. It’s an adventure.