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Interviews

1) Some of the stories in Music Through the Floor (“Children of God”, “Mission”, “Diablo”) are loosely based on your own experiences. What was it about those experiences that made them memorable? How did you translate that into fiction?

I should clarify that though those three stories are based on real-life experiences, none of the actual events in the stories are real: for example, I worked with two severely retarded men in Portland, Oregon, as Drew does in “Children of God,” but everything that happens in the story is entirely fictional. I find that if I hew too closely to real-life events it ends up stifling my imagination; I feel constrained by what actually happened and am unable to see the possibilities of plot, unable to make the story shapely or surprising or universal. One of the things I tell my students, when they want to write autobiographically, is to change several major characteristics of the people they’re writing about—not so much to save themselves from lawsuits, but to get the necessary distance on their characters. If someone has blond hair and is skinny, make them brown-haired and chunky: a small thing, but ironically it opens the story to life. The characters begin to live and breathe and do things that surprise you. There’s this wonderful quote by Turgenev, I’ll have to paraphrase because I don’t recall it exactly, but someone asked him how his day of writing had gone and he replied: “You wouldn’t believe what Bazarov did today!” That’s something to aspire to, I think.

In terms of those three stories, what made the real-life experiences behind them memorable, I’d have to say there was a sense that these particular stories hadn’t been told before (or at least, I hadn’t read them). I’d seen some sentimental Hollywood schlock about mentally retarded people, for example, but had never read or seen anything that captured the humor and despair and bizarre camaraderie of actually working with them. “Mission” is based on an experience I had teaching ESL in San Francisco: there was a Japanese woman in my class who decided she absolutely loathed me and would occasionally storm out of class for reasons I couldn’t for the life of me understand. I wanted to write about a hatred like this, one that seems to defy reason, I suppose to try to understand where it might come from.

2) “Essay #3: Leda and the Swan” is such a distinctive story because of the adolescent voice and style. Could you discuss how you captured that voice? What was the inspiration behind that story?

I taught composition at San Francisco State University for a few years, and would sometimes get essays written in this incredibly tortured, unintentionally funny language. I loved them. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but there was a bulletin board in the teacher’s lounge, and the comp teachers would copy down their favorite malapropisms and pin them up. (I remember one essay, on Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” that kept referring to Abner’s “testicular fortitude.”) Sometimes, too, the essays would be accidentally poetic in a way that intrigued me. So I thought first of all it would be a great comic vehicle for me; I could write, in that sort of tortured language, a story that appeared to be an essay addressed to a high school English teacher, but that was really more of an accidental memoir and a retelling of the Leda myth.

Another thing was that I kept having students come to my office hours, ostensibly because they’d gotten a C- on their paper, and burst immediately into tears. This happened quarter after quarter. I began to think about their home lives and how difficult they must be. I think that helped me make the imaginative leap into the story. I didn’t simply want to write a story for laughs, in this sort of benighted, ungrammatical voice; I wanted it to be about a tragically lost girl, someone readers would end up sympathizing with almost despite themselves. In any case, though I had a terrific time writing all those purposefully bad sentences, it wasn’t easy; I found that every time I sat down to work on the story, it took me an hour just to get back into the voice. I had to reread everything I’d written up to that point, like a form of hypnosis. And of course I rewrote and rewrote the story, to make sure the voice was consistent.

3) The stories in your collection are not linked, yet they share a theme of sorts: the main characters are all lost, all struggling to define themselves in a sometimes hostile world. Did you set out to write about this sort of character, or did it come about gradually? What do you find most compelling about them? What do you think the cumulative effect of the collection is?

I don’t generally set out to write with particular obsessions in mind. The fact that the stories are linked by common themes and characters is a bit of a surprise to me. It happens intuitively, I think. I write about characters I’m interested in, but also that I like—I guess I’m drawn to characters who find it difficult to navigate the world because those are the people I’m often drawn to in life. Some of this might even have to do with the short story form itself. Frank O’Connor called the short story the province of ''outlawed figures wandering about the fringes,” and I tend to agree with that. Several reviewers have commented on how the collection builds with each story and says something about the way we live in America, and that means a lot to me: I’d like to believe I’ve built a community of loners.

4) Although your stories have been published in many journals, Music Through the Floor was your first book. What was it like to publish a book—to have your work presented to a wide audience? How does it feel to read reviews?

It’s both weird and wonderful to have a book out there. On the one hand, you feel extremely vulnerable: a friend of mine likened it to showing up at a writing workshop without any clothes on. And it’s true, there’s a real nakedness to publishing a book, particularly when you’ve been working on it for a long time. On the other hand, it’s been incredibly validating for me: no one wants you to be a writer, in fact it’s probably the last thing the world needs, so to have a book come out and to see it get reviewed in the New York Times—well, you can finally go to a party and tell someone you’re a writer (if you dare).

Waiting for reviews to come out is of course extremely nerve-racking, but from an objective perspective it’s fascinating to see what people say about the stories. Everyone of course has a different favorite. And the fact that some critics have seen these overarching themes and obsessions, it’s been very eye-opening to me, and heartening. You become so close to the stories that you lose all perspective.

5) Do you enjoy reading from or discussing your work? How would you describe the experience of opening your work up to an audience of strangers?

I do like reading to an audience, quite a bit. It’s a completely different experience than writing, of course—in many ways, they’re opposites. Writing is such a solitary act, one that’s so removed from the reader, that it’s wonderful to see people’s faces and to get that instant reaction. It makes you feel less like a cave person. And often the reaction is quite surprising. Often people won’t laugh at what you think is the funniest part, and then fall out of their seats guffawing at something you didn’t expect. And to see someone physically moved by something that sprung from your imagination—it’s an incredible thing.

6) Who are you favorite writers? Favorite books? What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?

Where should I begin? Some of the books that had the biggest influence on me, certainly on my decision to be a short story writer, were the ones I read in college. I wanted to be a poet, but one of my professors took me aside and gave me some story collections to thumb through. I think he was tactfully trying to tell me I had no talent as a poet, that I should try my hand at fiction. Anyway, they were the books that made me want to write short stories: A Relative Stranger by Charles Baxter, Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver, Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff.

Both John Cheever and Flannery O’Connor are huge influences, the way they tackle tragic subject matter with a comic tone. I love Tolstoy, particularly Anna Karenina. I love Chekhov. Madame Bovary and Middlemarch and Portrait of a Lady. Of the classics, Lolita and The Great Gatsby are ones I return to maybe the most. I love James Salter’s work, both the stories and Light Years. Everything by Alice Munro is wonderful, but I have a particular affection for The Beggar Maid. Both Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell. White Noise by Don DeLillo. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. I don’t understand why Joy Williams isn’t world famous. I love Lorrie Moore, particularly Birds of America, and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Kazuo Ishiguro is wonderful, I think. Atonement by Ian McEwan. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I love ZZ Packer’s stories. Further afield, A High Wind in Jamaica by Robert Hughes, a weird, wonderful novel about some children abducted by pirates. I recently read The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury for the first time, which I thought was brilliant. Many, many others.

7) You teach writing at Stanford. What sort of advice do you give your students? What was the most important advice you received when you were a student?

The most important thing I tell them is to read, read, read. Let’s face it, there’s only so much you can teach in the classroom. There’s this romantic myth out there—lurking in some of my students’ hearts—that writing is purely a matter of talent, that all you need to do is sit down and wait for inspiration to strike and you’ll write an immortal story or novel in a single draft. Kerouac writing On the Road in six weeks, for example, or Faulkner and As I Lay Dying. I do my best to debunk this, to explain that writing is like any other vocation: it takes years of hard work before you can do it well. Just as you wouldn’t expect to design the Pompidou Center in Architecture 101, you can’t reasonably expect to write a masterpiece if you’ve never put pen to paper (or fingers to keys). So I try to impress upon them the extraordinary commitment and doggedness involved, and the fact that rewriting isn’t something that hacks resort to, but the most important part of the writing process.

8) You and your wife, novelist Katharine Noel, are both writers. Do you share and discuss your work with one another? What’s it like to live in a two-writer household?

People often ask us how we can live together, and my response is I couldn’t imagine living with anyone who wasn’t a writer. For one thing, I would have been murdered long ago. The hours of sitting in front of my computer, the inscrutable mood swings, the obsessing over semi-colons and space breaks: they would drive anyone who wasn’t a writer insane. And I’m extremely lucky, because my wife is not only a wonderful writer but a brilliant reader. She’s always the first to see my work, and the last, and I do the same for her. It’s more collaborative than perhaps we’d like to admit.

9) Describe your writing process. Do you have any favorite rituals?

I write on a computer, usually in the mornings, at a desk that has a too-interesting view of the pot smokers in my neighbor’s back yard. For some reason, I always listen to Bach’s cello suites, the same CD I’ve listened to—day in and day out—for years. I like to write to music, but can’t have anything with words. I don’t understand my wife, who types away to Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine.

10) You’re at work on your first novel. Was it difficult to move from short fiction to a novel?

Actually, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought. A short story is all about economy and singleness of effect, so there’s something liberating about having a much broader canvas. It’s wonderful to be able to live with your characters for years instead of months. But writing a novel is also more frightening, I think. It’s almost a religious act: despite the ups and downs, you need to have the faith that all these pages, all this work, will cohere into something beautiful.

11) Where does a story begin for you? How do you know to bring character A and character B together? Do you know what will come of their interaction before you set pen to paper, or do you let the characters wander? Or do the unique demands of short story writing preclude you from experimenting in that way?

Usually when I sit down to write a story, I’m most compelled by voice. I often have no idea where the story’s going or what’s going to happen or even sometimes what the basic situation is, but I have a voice in my head. It can be a first-person voice or it can be a third-person voice. For example, in “Child’s Play,” all I had was that first paragraph. I wanted to try to capture, with an adult’s vocabulary, the sort of rollicking, impressionable, hyperbolic mindset of an eleven-year-old boy. So I wrote that first paragraph without having any idea how the rest of the story went. Sometimes, too, I’ll start with a comic situation that appeals to me. With “A Fear of Invisible Tribes,” all I had was an idea: what would happen if a carjacker ended up accidentally stealing a driver’s ed car, filled with people who couldn’t drive? I had no idea where the story would go from there, or that a relationship would develop between Quinn, the protagonist, and one of her classmates.

In this way, I guess, all my first drafts are exploratory. The few times that I’ve outlined a story in advance have been disastrous: I find that if I don’t surprise myself when I’m writing, I won’t surprise the reader either. The moments that make writing really magical for me are these sorts of “inevitable surprises”: when the story does something you weren’t expecting, but which feels absolutely fitting and true.