Interviews

How does a story come to you, an image, a voice, a character?

For me, it’s usually either an image or a first line, which is related to voice. More often than not, though, it’s an image, usually an idea for an ending image. I always have no clue how I might get to that image and typically it ends up being cut or changed in revision, but during the first draft, that’s often what I’m following.

Some writers work line by line, getting each paragraph right before they go on, while others get a whole story down and then go back and revise, revise, revise. What is your process like for developing a story?

I’m definitely a reviser. I tend to blow through first drafts, so the initial attempt is often really messy and haphazard, and then in revision I fuss over every line.

The stories in your collection explore the intersection of the ordinary and the fantastical. What draws you to this contradiction?

I love the zone between the real and the un-real—or, more accurately, the gap between traditional realism and magical realism or whatever you want to call it. As a reader, I love all kinds of fiction, but as a writer, that in-between zone is what I’m most drawn to.

Your characters believe in creatures like Big Foot, Loch Ness Monster, and the Mokele-mbembe. How do these beliefs shape character?

I see these creatures as being, in part, a stand-in for the things that are ineffable to us, for all that is unknown and unreachable. There’s so much we will never know, will never understand, about ourselves and the people around us and the world at large, yet we keep trying to make it all make sense. My characters believe in things like the Loch Ness and Mokele-mbembe because they are trying to form a narrative that will make their own lives comprehensible; they want their lives to be about something. Their desires and obsessions often drive the stories and are  fundamental to who they are.

How do you get to know your characters deeper as you write your way into a story? Do you have any strategies that help you if you get stuck?

My sense of a character’s interior life is often hazy when I start out; they definitely don’t arrive fully-formed for me. Just going through the story time after time gradually builds my understanding of a character, as does working on creating the concrete landscapes of their life—jobs, setting, personal ticks, etc. Sometimes finding the right details or habits can really help dial a character’s interior life into focus.

In terms of getting stuck, I unfortunately haven’t found any magical tricks or remedies. I just have to keep dwelling on the problem and something either comes to me or it doesn’t.

You’ve talked about the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given. It came from Margot Livesey-the idea that a writer should be able to justify every sentence in a story or novel. How does this statement inform your work?

To me, it just means that you have to be a ruthless editor; don’t be soft on your work when you’re revising and take the time to question and consider the choices you’re making. I don’t take this saying totally literally, but I always try to hold the spirit of Livesey’s words in mind when I’m revising.

Do the stories change when you begin to look at them as a collection? How do you go about ordering and editing stories for a book?

I think you become more aware of redundancies, of not wanting to repeat yourself too much—which is certainly a potential pitfall when your collection has a lot of thematic overlap. So when revising the manuscript I wasn’t only thinking of each story but also of the larger enterprise.

With the order, the first and the last stories were relatively easy to choose, but what came between was harder. With an eye toward wanting to avoid redundancy, I separated stories that had more common ground and also staggered my two third person stories.

How has your work as editor for publications such as Redivider,Ploughshares, and Memorius influenced your writing or your creative process?

I really enjoy my editorial work, but it feels very separate from my writing. My editorial work feels like much more of a readerly connection than a writerly one—although you can learn a lot from reading the slush pile.

What would you say to new writers working on their first stories?

Read, read, read! Try to find authors who are doing what you’d like to do and study them. Also, support the community you’d like to be a part of: show up for readings, subscribe to literary magazines, and buy the books you love. If we don’t support our arts communities, they’re not likely to survive.

By Sarah Anne Johnson

You grew up playing in bands and writing lyrics for metal bands. How did this influence your desire to write? Do you listen to music when you write?

For me, there’s always been a connection between narrative and music. The first things I ever wrote were really terrible lyrics to bad metal songs, then those lyrics became bad poems, and then poems became stories. What I most often taken from music is mood or tone—it’s rare that a specific image or character comes out of a song I love. The other important thing is the performance aspect of music. As a musician, you write a song and then go out and perform it. I think of a lot of my work that way as well, especially short stories, which I don’t feel are actually complete until I can read them to an audience.

How does your reading life inform your writing and what are you reading now? 

I don’t think you can write without being a voracious reader. Besides reading my students’ work, I seek material that’s somehow connected to the kind of writing I’m working on. For The Great Perhaps, I kept going back to Vonnegut and Thomas Pychon. There was something about their work that seemed so inventive in how they were dealing with questions of war and complexity. I’ve been reading a lot of short stories lately, as that’s what I’m writing, and revisiting Salinger’s Franny and Zooey.

You’re writing plays as well as stories and novels. Do you prefer any one form? How does writing in one form influence your writing in another? 

I guess everything starts out as a short story for me. If the characters or question of the short story seem interesting enough, or maybe lead me to another set of questions, then I usually try it out as a play. For me, playwriting is a great way to understand narrative structure and its relationship to character. It forces you to get to the dramatic scenes and events of the material. If a play seems interesting, then I usually try it out as a novel next. A number of my novels, Hairstyles of the Damned, and The Boy Detective Fails, were written like that. It’s like constructing a large building room by room instead of trying to build it without any blueprint.

You’ve written two short story collections, Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir and Demons in the Spring. What are some of your considerations in arranging stories into a book? 

For both books, I looked at the tones and lengths and the points of view; I wanted to make sure the stories contrasted each other and were dynamic in how they were arranged. I didn’t want to put two stories with sad endings next to each other. For Demons, I also had the structural device that the book is broken up into four parts, with five stories, each taking place during a specific season. The first five stories take place in spring, the next five in summer, and so on. The short story collections I really love have the sense of being written by a number of different writers, where you really get to experience the range of the writer’s work. I think Barry Hannah’s Airships is probably the best collection I’ve read—it goes from these really lurid modern moments, to stories set in the future, to stories set in the Civil War. It’s a very different experience reading a collection, because you don’t tend to have that great a difference in tone and point of view in a novel.

How does a story or novel come to you, in an image, a voice, a character?

It always starts with an image. I’m working a story now about this brother and sister in their late thirties, and it started with the image of the two of them on a bicycle, the sister pedaling, the brother on the handlebars. So I had to write to figure out what that meant. My favorite writers, like Faulkner, claimed to do the same thing. I like the sense of discovery that always occurs when you follow your curiosity instead of trying to understand it all before you start writing. To me, when the material is working, it’s infinitely wiser and more intelligent than I actually am. It’s the best parts of myself, because it’s exaggerated, idealized, and so I have to remind myself over and over again to let the story tell itself.

Do you work on more than one project at a time?

I do. But I usually move from working on a novel to working on a play, all the while writing shorter material and non-fiction freelance work as well, though I don’t write bigger projects at the same.

Some writers craft a story sentence by sentence and don’t need to do a lot of revision on the final piece, while others write a draft, then they go back and revise, revise, revise. How do you draft and revise your work?

Jesus. Who are these writers who don’t need to go back and revise? I would love to be able to do that. I tend to write a draft and then go back over something again and again, first focusing on the character and scenes and interactions, then the details and physical descriptions, and then the specific language. Last, I start to look how the scenes work together structurally.

What makes for a good opening to a short story? A novel?

If you can introduce the character and conflict together in the first sentence, that’s a good start, for either a short story or a novel. To me, those are the things that most interest me, and are the components that drive the whole thing forward.

Your most recent novel, The Great Perhaps, begins “Anything resembling a cloud will cause Jonathan Casper to faint.” You’ve called this a response to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Can you say more about that?

It’s a blatant rip-off and a great example of how Vonnegut starts his book. His opening line to Chapter Two, which sort of actually starts the book, is “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” What does that mean? I don’t know, but I want to keep reading. I wanted the first line of my book to work like that, introduce the character, the conflict, in this very flat, direct tone that always has a kind of absurd quality to it. Besides the subject matter, I felt like the way he wrote the book, the sense of humor and purpose, are incredible.

The main characters are a University of Chicago paleontologist in search of a giant deep-sea squid and his wife, an animal behaviorist. How did you decide upon these careers, and how does a character’s work inform who they become on the page?

I don’t have any idea how I decided what they would do for a living. I knew their jobs would have something to do with clouds, which is a recurring image in the book, and also that Jonathan, because of his epilepsy, would have some sort of job that forced him to be indoors. So much of the internal struggles each of these characters have come through in their jobs. Jonathan is seeking simple answers to why the world is the way it is, and his search for the giant squid is informed by his cowardice and preference for isolation in his day to day life. His wife, Madeline, is having a hard time dealing with her family falling apart, and she is looking at the social structures of birds to try and figure out whether or not we still need families.

What drew you to explore cowardice through the members of the Casper family? 

If I think about the last seven or eight years in this country, the prevailing mood is one of absolute fear. The books was a way for me to explore questions about what happened during the time period, and why it seemed our country was immured by a fear of complexity.

The novel contains a lot of specific information about clouds, squids, and other particulars that must have required significant research. How did you go about your research?

I wrote the characters and the scenes and then did a lot of research to inform their lives.  There is a lot of material in there about squids and the mating habits of pigeons but ultimately it’s about a family and I had to keep in mind that no amount of research I did was going to change that.

How do you render elements of magical realism, such as the cloud that takes on human form and eludes Madeline, and keep them believable?

I don’t know if its magical realism or surrealism or absurdity, but it was very important for me to capture these moments that were surreal or absurd, because I felt that in order to be truthful to the mood of the country at the time, the book had to contain those moments. The other thing is that in more traditional novels where we don’t get to observe those kinds of moments, we miss out on how much a character’s imagination might inform their world.

Typically, you have to introduce the possibility of absurdity right at the beginning, so the reader knows the rules of the world, which the explanation of Jonathan’s medical condition does.

I guess, to be totally honest, I really don’t have much interest in whether a scene or a book is believable. In fact, I think most of the books and writing I really love is actually pretty unbelievable. I think this reliance on the idea of believability is actually a pretty huge disservice to the potential of fiction. If people want something believable, they should read a newspaper. For me, reading fiction is an opportunity to use my imagination in a way I don’t get to in any other quarter of my life. Unlike film, unlike TV, or video games, or any other cultural product, you have to actively use your imagination to read a book. When I think of the last seven or eight years in America, what I see is a complete and total lack of imagination, pretty much across the board.

You play with form in this novel, including drawings, transcripts of old radio shows, and government documents. What interests you in these modernist structural elements and what do you hope the narrative gains from these?

The Great Perhaps is about complexity and our fear of it. I wanted the book’s structure and the way it was written to reflect that possibilities of complexity. I used the various forms throughout to define the five different main characters.

Koren Zelek created the drawings for the book. How did you decide to work with Koren? Did you have input into the drawings?

Miss Zelek is my wife. I knew I would not have to pay her. I gave her the general idea for each drawing and then she ignored my instructions. She also did the cover for The Boy Detective Fails, which is one of my favorite covers.

In Thisbe and Amelia, the teenage Casper daughters, you capture so well the teenage struggle to engage in life and have a point-of-view in the midst of emotional uncertainty and vulnerability. Was it challenging to write from their point-of-view?

No.  I don’t think teenagers are any different than people in mid-life or senior citizens. I think the same struggles I had as a younger person, with family, with notions of purpose and country, are the same struggles I have. I think it makes us feel better to believe we’re these totally different people once we graduate high school and turn eighteen. But I just don’t believe it. Have you ever walked into a high school cafeteria? There’s the tables all arranged by different social groups, by gender, by race. I see the same trends when I look at the neighborhoods in Chicago. The conflicts we have, starting in our teen years, continue through the rest of our lives. Everybody wants to be seen as worthwhile. Everyone wants to be liked.

You write about teenagers in earlier books, such as Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails. What draws you to exploring characters in their adolescence?

Hairstyles is definitely about adolescence; The Boy Detective is about someone in his thirties. Both of them are about characters who are struggling to make sense of the world, which is what most of my stories end up being about. I don’t why I’ve write about younger characters sometimes, other than my favorite writers, like Salinger and Daniel Clowes, seem to as well. It could have something to do with my age and the fact that I’m closer to that material than someone in their seventies.

Reviewers have called both The Great Perhaps and The Boy Detective Failstragicomedies. What interests you in rendering the humorous alongside the tragic?

I think again, it’s what I like to read. There’s something about the use of dynamics, of experiencing the full scale of emotions that makes those kinds of books more interesting to me. I guess it also reflects how I experience life—that among all these heartbreaks and tragedies—there’s almost always something entirely ridiculous happening.

The Great Perhaps has an open ending, one that leaves the events open to interpretation. What did you want your readers to take away from this?

All my favorite books resolve the questions they set out to ask but then end with a whole new set of questions. That way, you feel reading it, that the lives of the characters continue after the last page is read. The family in the book temporarily resolves their major conflicts, but only temporarily.

With The Great Perhaps you switched publishers from Akashic to Norton. How different is it working with a small, independent publisher and now a large one?

Norton and Akashic are very similar in their approach to publishing books. The fact that Norton is the oldest independent publisher in the country has definitely helped in introducing my work to more traditional outlets. I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with both of them and hope to continue to work with Akashic and Norton again.

You currently teach creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago. What are some of the challenges you see your students struggling with?

I think the thing a lot of students struggle with is finding material they’re interesting in and then devising a structure for that material. We read and write a lot—Columbia’s Story Workshop method really gives students the opportunity to write in class, then read what they’ve written, then take it home to complete a draft. I think that’s the most important thing a beginning writer can do: to write all the time. That’s how I learned and continue to figure things out.

What would you say to new writers working on their first stories or novel?

Write because you love it, divorced from notions of money, acclaim, or fame. All those things are distractions that ultimately disappoint you. And be prepared to write a lot of bad material. In fact, in some perverse way, you have to really enjoy spending hours on something that you will probably discard. Writing is a process that takes practice, which means you really have to get in your head that it’s okay to fail.

The Joe Meno File

I think our lives, as readers are more or less ‘shadow lives’ to our lives as writers.  There is a deep connection, though we may not be immediately conscious of a specific influence.  That’s why it’s so important that we read literature, as a culture and a nation — writers truly are the conscience of the cultures from which they write.  If we respond to images and sound bites rather than sustained narratives that reflect and interpret the meaning of our lives, we lose our way in the long story of our generational histories.  As for my own reading, I’m re-reading books that I’m considering assigning as supplemental reading for my fiction workshop at Rutgers Newark in the fall: Fat City, by Leonard Gardner, They Came Like Swallows, by William Maxwell, James Agee’s A Death In The Family, Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries, Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, Junot Diaz’ Drown.

View video with Jayne Anne discussing craft

What about these novels is particularly instructive to new writers?
The Munro and Diaz texts are connected stories with novelistic arcs.  I love Shield’s writing, and that particular novel is written in sections that expand to a generational story structured in metaphors.   The Maxwell and Agee are almost companion texts, both written as first books of fiction, both the transformed true stories of the early loss of a parent, both written to assure the psychic survival of the writers, both pitch-perfect in their evocations of character and child’s point of view.  Fat City is, simply, a perfect novel, written by Gardner over many years and edited over time to a tighter and tighter book.  Line by line, it’s a textbook on voice, place, class, dialogue; elegantly economical and limitless in its acceptance, its luminous sorrow, and the dignity with which it imbues every scene.

What goes on in your fiction workshop?
Our faculty members each work intently and differently, so that students are mentored in different ways by different instructors.  My workshop is equally made up of writing, editing, and reading books we discuss as technical and spiritual references.  I divide the students into groups so that each writer knows his or her deadlines at the outset, and each writer presents three or four new stories a semester. We begin with the writer reading, and proceed to discussion that addresses the intent, the world, the successful elements, the questions, the points at which the writer’s authority wavers, or the reader is lost.

We then talk about the sentences themselves: the sentences, one-by-one, line after line, are the crux of the matter.  My students get a line edit from me that is very specific, and they line-edit every story we discuss, which enables them to develop as editors; they also come to class with typed single-spaced one page responses on which to base their class comments.  The writer whose work is discussed receives the line edits and responses to aid in revision.

That’s a basic outline, but the community formed within the group is always different, always specific. RN MFA students work hard; they’re an engagingly diverse, experienced, talented group.  The program is designed to inspire community rather than competition: no one is competing for aid, for instance. There is focused intent to write deeply and well, to exceed one’s own capabilities and expectations.

In an earlier interview you said that you were influenced by Southern writers “for their connection to the physical world, and their enslavement to it.” Can you say more about that?
In more rural areas, the world stays up close — the natural world, whatever the landscape.  The feel and smell of a place becomes part of our identity, bred into us for generations, perhaps.  It’s home, emotionally, sensually, associatively.  The writing hones toward it, though the writer is often forced to leave in order to survive as an artist, to find the space to speak.
Think of Joyce: silence, exile and cunning.  By ‘cunning,’ I think he meant an alert, adaptable clarity, so there’s that.  But there’s also a bit of sorrow, a deepening.

What is your process like drafting and revising a novel?
I really don’t ‘draft’ my novels, in the sense of planning them out.  I begin with language itself, a line, a way into a voice, and find the story inside it.  As for revision, I go over every line again and again, but I don’t throw out a lot of material.  I trust in the material itself and stay with it

For as long as it takes.  There are obvious disadvantages to this method — it’s a slow, painstaking process.  I call it the high anxiety method.

What do you think makes for a good opening to a novel?
I want to feel a sense of risk in the language from the very first line.

What would you say to new writers working on their first stories or novel?
The writer’s first community is within literature: I’d ask them if they’ve read deeply and broadly enough, if they’ve learned to read as writers.  Writing is part dogged persistence, part skilled (self) editing, part redemption/devotion, in that we need to write what is deeply important to us, and to readers.  And if they’re really talented, I’d encourage them to apply to Rutgers Newark.