A Conversation with Jean Thompson, Author of Do Not Deny Me
You’re well known for your short fiction, and Do Not Deny Me is your fifth collection of short stories. Tell us a little bit about your experiences writing short fiction versus novels—what challenges and joys are a part of the process for you.
I've written more short stories than novels and so probably have more ease with them. I've heard it say that novels are really one big long story, and have the same needs as stories—for tension, dramatic action, and closure—only in extended form. Novels, even brief ones, demand that you move in with the project, so to speak. It's sustained work for a period of time. Stories require less commitment but just as much patience.
You have taught creative writing at the University of Illinois, Northwestern, and Reed University, among others. How has teaching affected your own writing?
It's possible to have conversations about writing and literature in the classroom that feed your own writing in productive ways. Sometimes the very challenge you've been wrestling with in your own work gets articulated or examined and that's fortuitous. There is some exceptional student work that can get you excited all over again about the enterprise of writing, just as, I must admit, really, bad writing can make you despair of it. But it's a luxury to be in the company of those who believe that fiction matters and is worth doing well.
You have been heralded as the “singer of ordinary people” and “poet of . . . unglamorous lives” (Booklist). How does every day life interest you? How do you think you got this reputation?
Everyday life interests me because it's pretty much the only life we've got, most of us, and because I want to believe that within the everyday lurk all the ingredients for tragedy and comedy. I mean that we are all worthy subjects of study, like a drop of pond water seen under a microscope. I remain hopelessly fascinated by the real and recognizable world, and have never felt the need to explore the lives of anyone merely wealthy or notorious.
Your last collection of stories, Throw Like a Girl, takes dead aim at the secret lives of women. In Do Not Deny Me, your characters include women and men of many different ages, experiences, and abilities (including a stroke victim and one with supernatural power). How do you breathe life into each character and lend such credibility to the situations in which they find themselves?
Everyone I know can breathe a sigh of relief: I don't base characters on actual people, but rather on a more general and distilled observation of human behavior. These days, my characters are an outgrowth of a particular story situation, rather than being the basis or reason for a story. And of course, craft enters into the process, since it’s more artful to work against a reader’s expectations. For instance, Fay, the psychic in the title story, “Do Not Deny Me,” is not a glamorous otherworldly presence, but a seemingly-ordinary middle-aged lady who works in the Department of Motor Vehicles. And Hurley, the stroke-disabled character in “Escape” is someone you can feel sorry for, yet he is also cantankerous, profane, and even downright mean.
A writer needs at least the rudiments of empathy—I suppose we all do—in order to render characters who are quite unlike oneself. There's always the sense of pushing the boundaries of your own experience and trying to imagine someone else’s, of wondering how someone might behave, given their background, circumstances, and motivations. I'd like to think of it as exercising a kind of muscle, one that might help me to better understand our mysterious fellow-humans.
The settings for many of your stories often take place in an ordinary town in the middle of America. A couple take place in the great cities of Chicago and New York. How important is setting to you? Do you feel that readers of Do Not Deny Me will take particular note of its American motifs?
Setting energizes me and is often a jumping-off place for a story, something concrete with which to begin a story. Eventually you hope that story takes over from the setting or that story builds on whatever mood, color, or fact exists in its locale.
Some might say that your stories are a bit dark. But there is a sense of humor that runs through them. Can you tell us about how you show wisdom through humor?
I suppose that humor is a way of refreshing or reexamining a situation, giving it an unexpected shading. I'd like to think that a lot of my humor is really irony, pointing out a subtext or incongruity that isn't readily apparent.
What do you like to read?
I love a great many writers, all with equal, promiscuous enthusiasm: Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Durrell, Flannery O'Connor, T.C. Boyle, Alice Munro, Dan Chaon, Charles Baxter, Leo Tolstoy, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and on and on and on.
Interview with Jean Thompson
