Stephen Dixon Takes the Fifth

The first in the soon-to-be iconic interview series where writers lay it all out for Fifth Wednesday Journal

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Walt Whitman may have contained multitudes, but a Stephen Dixon character has a capacity for the infinite. Dixon’s people misremember, fantasize, re-remember, and perseverate to the point where accuracy is not only out of the question, it’s beside the point. The author of twenty-eight published works of fiction, he has also amassed a shelf- full of awards and accolades including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Book Award nominations. Dixon may be that very rare artist: uniquely gifted, utterly original, uncompromising in his vision, and revered among people for whom literature still matters.

On a recent September afternoon I sat with him in his Baltimore- area home, talking about his quixotic literary career, the recent death of his wife Anne Frydman, and his current project, an enormous novel called His Wife Leaves Him. We sat at his dining room table drinking coffee, beside a short stack of copies of his latest book What Is All This? Uncollected Stories from Fantagraphics Books.

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FWJ: I know you spent some of your pre-writerly days as a broadcast journalist and you interviewed some pretty impressive names. Do you have any tips for me on how to conduct this interview?

Stephen Dixon: I was brash. I got my interview with Richard Nixon walking down the hallways of Congress when he was totally resistant to being interviewed other than at press conferences. But I got it, and I got my interview with Khrushchev by running up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which would get you shot today. I did this by being brash, by going under the separating barrier and just rushing up. Same thing with Nixon. I saw him walking in the halls of Congress, and I ran up to him and asked if he’d give me an interview. He thought I was cute — I was all of twenty-three years old, and he gave me an interview. I did the same thing with Lyndon Johnson when he was Majority Leader. He was very skeptical of reporters but he gave a rare radio interview because I just put a microphone in front of his mouth.

FWJ: So you couldn’t go back and neurotically test the equipment over and over like I just did.

SD: Oh, no. But I should have at the Democratic convention. I had a feeling that Adlai Stevenson was going to be ushered through the convention and there was going to be a big uproar. So I got very close to him with my Wollensack, which was a big reel-to-reel recorder that weighed about forty pounds, and I was squeezed. I got the interview but it didn’t come out because the crowd had squeezed me so much the tapes had jarred loose from the spindle.

FWJ: Who were you working for?

SD: I was working for a company called News Associates and Radio Press. They were a news services for radio and TV stations and newspapers.

FWJ: I want to start by asking about your writing habits — Paris Review-type questions. You showed me your writing desk earlier, which is a long table in your bedroom covered with books and loose- leaf papers. In the center is your typewriter under a dust cover. Not a computer. Tell me about the typewriter.

SD: The typewriter is a Hermes, a Hermes Standard, so it’s between a portable and a table model. And it’s the most reliable typewriter I’ve ever had. It’s never been broken; it’s never been repaired. I’ve just

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had to get it cleaned. All the other typewriters I’ve ever had, mostly Royals, would break apart eventually.

FWJ: How did you come upon the Hermes?

SD: There was a guy who used to sell me equipment in New York and he said this was a great typewriter and he was the sole representative of it in the United States. I bought one and I liked it so much I bought two, and then I bought a third, which was a table model, which was too big.

FWJ: How much time a day do you devote to writing? SD: Three to four hours. If not more.

FWJ: Always the same time of day?

SD: No, it’s whenever I get a break. For instance, I probably normally would be at the typewriter now. After I read the newspapers and have my morning coffee — I usually write between nine and twelve or ten to one. Then I go to the gym and then get back to the writing. But because you were coming over I went to the gym early today, and then after the interview I’ll start my typing.

FWJ: You’re not one of those people hung up on the morning hours.

SD: If I have ten minutes free — and this has happened to me a thousand times — in other words I only get ten minutes to write, I’ll go to the typewriter and work on a sentence or two for ten minutes, five minutes. I can say, “Well, I got something done today.”

FWJ: Do you write from longhand notes that you’ve written out ahead of time?

SD: I just write — the part I’m on now [of His Wife Leaves Him], which is called “Outtakes” and has about forty different scenes that haven’t been dealt with in the novel heretofore, I write out the first line by hand ahead of time. I say, what’s the next segment I’m going to write? Because they’re usually two to five pages, a line comes to my head and I write it down, and then I take it to the typewriter and the scene usually follows. So I know that I’m going to be writing for the rest of my life because I have this way of starting that enables me to just sort of set off on something that leads to a piece of fiction. My joke was that the only “writer’s block” I knew was the one on Seventy-

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Fifth where I lived. I would walk down the street in the summer and there were three or four writers — one of them was Harold Brodkey — and I would hear them typing away. I’ve never had a writer’s block in my life and I’ve been writing now more than fifty years.

FWJ: Do you listen to music when you write?

SD: No, I don’t. I listen to music, but only before or after I write. I would find it very distracting. Other writers can be very surprised to hear that I don’t listen to jazz when I write, but to me that’s a distraction. If a guy’s outside with a leaf blower, that’s a distraction.

FWJ: As we’re talking now I can hear children playing in the schoolyard across the street.

SD: That doesn’t distract me. Kid voices are beautiful. Leaf blowers are ugly. And he does it for thirty minutes. If it goes on I’ll just move the typewriter to another room, which is the advantage of having a portable or a moveable typewriter. I can come out here [to the dining room table] to type, which is where I wrote for years while Anne was sick so I could be nearer to her. And I wait for the leaf blowing to stop and then move back to my desk. Jarring sounds are distracting. Writers are very sensitive to noise — to grating voices, to machines that make sort of horrible clashing sounds.

FWJ: You said you often start out with a line you’ve written out ahead of time . . .

SD: I always start with a line I’ve written out ahead of time. And that line will lead to that completed first draft of that particular section of the novel. In other words, from that line I go to another line and then another line and then another line and eventually I have a completed first draft and then I start refining that section.

FWJ: Are the first lines usually description or dialogue or something else?

SD: No, they can be anything. This novel has everything. I’ve been working on His Wife Leaves Him for four years and four months, but for instance the one I wrote yesterday, a first draft, begins: “He never told her this.” That’s all I needed. “He never told her this,” because I knew what I wanted to write about, which was how he almost killed their cat by leaving it outside and a fox grabbed it and maimed it and the cat almost died. But he never told her this. I wrote it down and then

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I went to the typewriter and typed the line, and then I wrote the next line down which was: “Because he knew she would be very angry with him.” And then it proceeds to being a finished section about what the experience was. The line is a catalyst.

FWJ: You aren’t superstitious about talking about what you’re currently working on?

SD: No, no. I don’t mind. It’s eight hundred pages now. These are manuscript pages. And I always have twenty-four lines to a page, and ten to twelve words to a line, so you can figure out how many words there are to this novel. It’s in five sections, and it’s all predicated on the narrator saying in the kitchen while his wife is in the bedroom — and his wife has had two strokes already — “I wish you would die already.” He’s so fed up at that particular moment of taking care of her. And he goes, “Oh god I hope she didn’t hear that.” And he goes in to see her and she had heard. And she does die that night of a stroke. And so the whole novel is really to go back in their life. It’s a novel about a marriage. That didn’t happen, by the way.

FWJ: Do you worry about that? Because so much of your writing is based on or begins in your actual situation. People in your books don’t always behave in the way we wish we would behave. Do you worry people will think badly of you?

SD: The novel is very close to me, certainly many of the sections are. But no, I’m not worried about it. Some things are pretty close to the bone and other things are made up. The section I’m working on now is the last few hundred pages of the book, where he’s just lying in bed after the memorial for his wife and recapitulating different scenes in their life: how they met, when they first went to bed together, when she broke up with him, how they got married. But not sequentially. The novel is in third person and totally unsequential, unchronological. Then the last part is to fill in the blanks that are in the first four parts. That’s my phone.

FWJ: Do you need to get that?

SD: Ah, no. To hell with it. They can leave a message if they really

need to.

FWJ: I know you have a book called Phone Rings, where a phone call sets off the actions of the story. What do you actually do if the phone rings when you’re writing?

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SD: I answer it. It never stops me. In fact I often get new ideas after I leave my typewriter to answer the phone. It helps, it hurts. It adds up to be even. So the last section, “Outtakes,” comprises forty to fifty small sections of stuff that I hadn’t written about yet and a couple of them he has written — not written, but thought about. He thinks, haven’t I thought about this before? Because it’s also an examination of a human mind and how it operates. And then it goes right back to the beginning of the novel, a very short passage which I’ve already written, about the knock on his classroom door telling him that someone is on the phone. And it’s about the first stroke. And then he gets out of bed after four hundred pages of thinking and makes himself a cup of coffee.

FWJ: What’s a good day of writing versus a bad one?

SD: I don’t have any bad ones. I usually get a page or two at least. Since three months after Anne died at least a page day, because I took a hiatus from writing when she died. A good day is two pages, but that doesn’t happen frequently because I rewrite the page so often that I’m exhausted by the time I finish rewriting the page. The system is I write that first section and then I refine it page by page. But the first segment is written in twenty minutes, an hour, two hours . . . and I never go right back to it. I usually start the refinement the day after so I can think about the sections I just wrote and read it and see what I’m doing and how I can improve it as I’m refining it.

FWJ: When you’re refining, are you making macro changes in the plot as well?

SD: It could be. I could be changing something that is illogical, like he might be in the car when he says something and I might need to take him out of the car when he says it because she wouldn’t have heard him when he was in the car. In other words, I might change things around. And usually if the “Outtakes” section is two pages it’ll end up being five pages. I always expand. I never condense in my refinement process. My work usually doubles from the initial draft.

FWJ: Have you ever gotten hung up on a single sentence?

SD: Oh, sure! I could spend an hour or two on a single sentence. I don’t want any sentence to go by until it’s as perfectly written as I can write it. And it has to be absolutely clear. This is the clearest novel I’ve ever written. I rewrite it and I say, what’s another way of writing it, and I write that and then finally I get it and I add that line to the section. I like a fast pace and simplicity.

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FWJ: Which do you prefer: banging through those first drafts, or the slower work of refining the original?

SD: I like the revising better. The first draft has a lot of anxiety built into it because I don’t know if I’m going to get it right. The refinement is sometimes a little taxing, but it’s easier because I already have the skeleton, the first draft, I’m going to turn into the finished draft of that section. But the first draft also has that ecstasy at the end where you get to say: I got it. Hey, look what I got. I didn’t know it was there, and it’s there now. After I finish the section, either right afterwards I go to the next one because I know what the next one’s going to be, or else I wait until the next day and start the first draft of the next section. In which case, I guess I get the rest of the day off.

FWJ: So it seems, then, you must have a pretty good sense conceptually of the size and shape of each novel even before you start.

SD: Yes. That’s right. But no, not length. This novel I thought would only be three hundred pages. But that’s the wonderful thing about a novel: it grows and grows. It leads to places that you didn’t know existed.

FWJ: I was going to ask you how the computer has changed the way you write but it seems now that it really hasn’t.

SD: No. I communicate with editors more through e-mail, but that’s about it. I don’t think my writing habits have changed at all in the last twenty years.

FWJ: How often does an editor make major changes in your work?

SD: They don’t edit my work. I remember with Henry Holt, Alan Peacock was the editor and he said, “Are you the type of writer who wants hands off or hands on?” I said hands off. Of course if there’s something that doesn’t make any sense then they should tell me. Otherwise, I’ve worked very hard on these manuscripts and I don’t want them interfered with.

FWJ: Over the years you’ve worked with quite a large number of publishers.

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SD: I’ve had fourteen publishers for twenty-eight books. I was with Holt for four books and then they republished Frog, so really for five books. And then when I sent them Old Friends, they said no more from you, you haven’t made us any money. Same thing with Melville. They said they didn’t want to publish What Is All This? because they said I had lost them a lot of money with the three books they did publish. I would love to have a relationship with a publisher similar to John Updike’s where one publisher, Knopf, publishes all your books. Editors might change but usually you get a good one. But it didn’t happen that way. I published two with Harper and Row and I gave them my novel Garbage and they rejected it and said no more books. I don’t leave publishers. They leave me.

FWJ: Do you feel bad when a publisher passes on your next work?

SD: No. I feel a little bad because there is safety and it means I have to look for a publisher again. But that’s OK too, because I’ve always been able to find a publisher for my work. And lately I’ve been having help. For instance, with British American Publishing there’s a writer who knew the reader and thought the reader might like my work, and they published Love and Will and then Frog. And with McSweeney’s I had a student — an undergrad but an older undergrad, twenty-three years old — who had a beer with Dave Eggers in California after a reading. He said, “My teacher is Stephen Dixon, do you know his work?” And Dave said, “Oh, yeah.” And he said, “Well, he was just telling us in class that he has a new novel he can’t get published.” Dave said, “Tell him to send it to me.” That was I., and then they published End of I. after that. Then there’s this guy in D.C. who I met because he sent me some books to sign. In other words, he’s a fan, but he’s a sweetheart. And when McSweeney’s rejected the second of three books that were all related, he said, “There’s a new publisher, Melville House, and I think they would like your work. Let me contact them.” So he called them and they said, “Yeah, tell him to send the manuscript,” and they took it in a week. That was Old Friends. And then they took two more. Then when they kicked me out because my books didn’t make enough money for them, which is OK, I understand, that doesn’t bother me, I understand the consideration. But then Paul said, “There’s a house called Fantagraphics Books in Seattle, which I’m familiar with, let me check with them to see if they’re interested.”

FWJ: Publishing your work has become sort of a grassroots movement. SD: I don’t ask them to go to bat for me, but they do it on their own.

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FWJ: It must feel gratifying but also sort of strange to be suddenly “discovered” by a whole new generation of readers. Now that Daniel Clowes has done a cover for you and you’ve got that Jonathan Lethem blurb on your books, it seems as though the cool kids have finally taken notice. Do you hang out with Lethem?

SD: No, but we’ve e-mailed, and of course his name is on all my books now. And apparently he didn’t give either publisher permission to use that quote, but he doesn’t care. And I knew that we shared some similar habitats. I sent him a copy of Frog thanking him for his endorsement. As for the younger people . . . I am relatively unknown, so it could mean young readers are attracted to my fiction because I haven’t been discovered for them by older readers. They discover me themselves.

FWJ: Do you think had that sort of adulation been constant or had come earlier it might have changed your work in some way? I’m thinking of your story “The Victor,” which I assume is about the National Book Award you didn’t win. In the story you have two versions of the awards ceremony, “Way It Happened,” where the protagonist loses the prize, and then “Way It Didn’t Happen,” where he wins.

SD: Yes, that was about the first NBA nomination. It would have changed me a little. I certainly would have been more solvent than I was, and it would have been a real pleasure to go on half-teaching load, which I would have done. I would have had almost the same salary for a half load as I would for a full one because I would have won the National Book Award. But it was good because it sort of roused in me — not in anger — but a sort of fighting spirit that I always have. Sort of an “I’ll show them.” Listen, I was lucky to be nominated and we had a great time in New York. The judges read Frog in manuscript form. And not from page one to page seven hundred and sixty-three, whatever it was. They read page one to fifty, then page three hundred to three hundred and sixty-five. That’s how the editor sent the novel, in complete sections, but they were out of order. And I still almost won according to two judges. But I like the idea of a story like that [“The Victor”], a “what if” story. Whatever happened to the guy who actually did win? I think he wrote one book after that. Maybe he’s working on a two-thousand-page novel or something. It took him a long time to get the first book out, although that was a pretty good book.

FWJ: Your second NBA nomination was for Interstate.

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SD: That one I had to face Phillip Roth. There were two other candidates but apparently the judges voted two-two. I spoke to Elena Howe, Irving Howe’s wife, and she said, “Who are you running against?” And I mentioned the other four but when I said Philip Roth she said, “You lost. He’s too well connected, he’s too famous.”

FWJ: Do you feel like you’re part of a literary scene?

SD: No, no. I belong to no group, no movement, and no organization. Truthfully, I don’t think anyone is writing like I write, so I’m all by myself. And I like it that way.

FWJ: Do you ever tour with the books?

SD: I really hated it when I was having to do readings. I’ve only done tours twice, and both times were for Henry Holt when they sent me with The Stories of Stephen Dixon to a couple of places out of town, and for Interstate they sent me twice, all the way to the west coast to Seattle and Colorado. Two week tours, separated by a week. It was tough on Anne, too, leaving her home. I never liked it, and not many people ever showed up, and that’s embarrassing. It’s really embarrassing when only two or three people show up. I have been to Washington, D.C., for the Melville House books, and that’s about it.

FWJ: The first story you ever published was “The Chess House” in The Paris Review.

SD: Issue 29, 1963, Spring. I was working at CBS as an editor for a news program called “In Person,” and Ron Cochran who preceded Walter Cronkite as the host of the show was the main guy. The guy who was the writer for the show was Hughes Rudd. Hughes had stories in The Paris Review and was a friend of George Plimpton. Instead of going to lunch I would go into a room with a typewriter and work on my fiction. Hughes said, “Why don’t you show me your work? I know George Plimpton.” I gave him ten stories and he took two of them, “The Chocolate Sampler” and “The Chess House.” George chose “The Chess House.” But the story goes on. Hughes says, “You know George is taking one of your stories. Your first story is going to be in The Paris Review, but he wants you to call him.” So I called him and he said, “I want to get this in the next issue. Could you come to my apartment right away?” So I go to his apartment during my lunch break at CBS, and it’s very swanky, and he’s very dashing and dapper and pleasant and bright, but he doesn’t like many of the things I did in this five- or six-page story. He said, “You know nothing about chess,”

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and I said, “I know something about chess,” and he says, “You made a couple of mistakes here, and I want you to correct them.” And he went through the story, just sort of tore it apart, and he says, “Go home, rewrite it, send it to me express within the week.” So I go home and rewrite under his specifications. But I don’t send it express because he lives right across town and regular mail will get to him. And I don’t hear from him in six months, so obviously I’ve missed that issue. Then I got the story back from him and he says, “You didn’t do anything I said. You didn’t do this, this, and this.” He gave me a whole new set of corrections, so I work on them and I send back the story. And I wait another — must have been three months. And he sends it back and says, “You didn’t do a thing I said. If you did, then you didn’t do enough. Rewrite the story again.” So I just thought, screw this. And I got the original manuscript the way I had originally sent it to him and sent that again and I didn’t hear back, and that’s what he published. It sounds like fiction, but it’s not. And from then on, even though they published three more stories of mine, and gave me the John Train Humor Prize, which was OK because it was a thousand bucks, from then on it was a love-hate relationship between George and myself. Someone doing a profile on me for the City Paper here in Baltimore asked George what he thought of me, and George said, “Stephen Dixon thinks I ought to change the name of my magazine to the Dixon Review.” But I liked George — and he did a great service to literature too.

FWJ: A lot of the stories and novels are about memory, and the struggle to remember things as they were, and thinking about how things might have been if this hadn’t happened or if that did happen. Some of what is remembered in Frog contradicts scenes that the reader has already experienced, events presented as facts. Other chapters are things that couldn’t possibly have happened, such as Howard and his family on a transport car headed into Auschwitz. All of this is presented as the reality of that moment.

SD: That’s right. For me, fiction is about memory. So much of my fiction is about my life. There could almost be two kinds of writers: the inventor and the memoirist. One deals with memory and one who invents. I invent too, but I’m more on the memory side than on the invention side. I invent when the memory doesn’t satisfy the fiction, the aims of the fiction. So then I invent things around the memory.

FWJ: I don’t know that there exists such a complete portrayal of one individual in fiction. By the time the reader finishes you know Howard’s every impulse, his ugly thoughts and his good moments and

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his cowardices as well as the occasional triumph. I’ve told people that to me Frog is like Moby Dick in terms of its encyclopedic nature. Not to overstate it.

SD: I wanted to get everything in. And in the subsequent books I go deeper and deeper. For instance, my novels after Frog deal with some of the same material, but I go deeper and deeper in.

FWJ: Do you see your novels all as one continuous work? Like Kerouac, for example, who wanted to go back and give all the characters in all his novels the same names?

SD: No, I don’t. There are similarities in the main narrators probably in all of my fiction because I take my fiction out of myself.

FWJ: Are the unusual structures part of what moves you in the creation?

SD: I like an unusual structure. I like to structure my books in ways that no one ever has before. I’ve already written books that are chronological, where they begin with a certain point in one’s life and end at a later point. Now I like to mix it all around for the reader to sort of have the mix, but be able to put the mix together to make a whole.

FWJ: So you must then have a sense of that structure even before you start.

SD: No, it develops as I go. The only sense I have is this book is not going to be structured like any of my other books, or like anyone else’s other book. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, but I know it’s going to be different and interesting to the reader because he or she hasn’t seen this kind of structure before.

FWJ: And the words, too, are like a deluge.

SD: Yes. I love that flow of words. And now my sentences are much more concise. I don’t think there is even one flowing sentence in the entire book I’m working on. Stream of consciousness sentences have been pretty well worked on at this point. But in some of my work I’ve had sentences that go on for ten, twenty, forty, fifty pages. But I’ve intentionally written them like that, with the intention that the reader would not know there was no real punctuation break, no periods. And then maybe the reader will be impressed with himself that he has read something so long without a period. In His Wife Leaves Him all

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the sections are single paragraph. And I’ve been writing that single- paragraph way for almost twenty years. I just don’t know when to stop except when it’s at the end of what I’m writing about.

FWJ: How important is a title to you?

SD: Very important. It’s supposed to mean something else, in addition to what it means. I like titles with multiple meanings: a comment on the work as a whole or an additional reflection.

FWJ: Where does it usually come in the process?

SD: After the first draft or during the writing of the first draft I sort of

know what the title will be.

FWJ: Something like Interstate is pretty straightforward, but the title Frog really changes the entire texture of the work in a lot of ways. It seems to not have any bearing until the very end when it turns out there’s a pet turtle with that name.

SD: Exactly. That’s my private little joke at the end. The last story I wrote two years before finishing the book, which took me five years. I remember we were on our way to Maine and Anne was beside me and the kids were in the back, so it had to be around 1993 or ‘92. And I said, “Wait, I just got an idea for a story about why it’s called Frog.” And so I said, “Sophia, write it down for me. I’m going to dictate what the first few lines are.” So she wrote it down, and when we got to Maine I wrote the story, and then I wrote the rest of the novel that got to the final story. But to me the multiple meaning of Frog is that he’s a turtle. And what is a turtle? A turtle hides. Everything that a turtle is I thought Howard Tetch was. He has a shell, he’s amphibious.

FWJ: You had the title Frog before the idea of what it meant?

SD: Oh, yes, because the first seventeen stories are Frog does this, Frog Made Free, all this stuff. Frog Remembers. Frog in Prague. That’s where the novel started, in Prague.

FWJ: Was it actually in Kafka’s cemetery?

SD: Yes, which I never got to. I was on a tour. I was going to Prague and Germany with Anne and Sophia who was then two, two-and-a-half years old. And Poland. The first stop was Munich and then we went to Prague. And we took a couple of books with us and Sophia had the Frog and Toad books, which you must have read to your kids too.

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FWJ: Oh, yes!

SD: So we took Frog and Toad and when we got to Prague, Sophia said, “Frog in Prague.” And then later I went to find Kafka’s grave, and what happened to Howard happened to me. The tour guy was giving me the runaround. He just wanted his shekels, or whatever they got. His money. He finally said, “If you want Kafka you have to go to some other cemetery.”

FWJ: What do you read for pleasure?

SD: Whatever I can find. Recently someone turned me on to a Finnish writer born in 1942 named Albo Passilinna. He only has two books published in America, and I really liked both of them. And yesterday I finished another book, so now today I started Walter Benjamin’s chronicles of the 1900s, about his boyhood days. It has to be serious books I read. I don’t read pulp, nothing that’s been on the bestseller list. I recently found a book on my daughter’s bookshelf by Junichiro Tanizaki, and I had read his work before. The Key is a terrific novel. But this was called Some Prefer Nettles, so I started that and I like it. I always find something worthwhile to read; Thomas Bernhard, if he has a new one coming out.

FWJ: Did I miss anything? SD: You’re the interviewer.

FWJ: Is there something a more brash interviewer would have asked that I haven’t?

SD: The interviewee never supplies the questions. FWJ: No? Never?

SD: This one doesn’t.

Daniel Libman served as past fiction editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal. He is currently the Book Reviews Editor for FWJ. His story collection Married But Looking is forthcoming from Livingston Press.

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On a pleasant March afternoon in New York City I got to sit down with writer Elizabeth Strout in the reception room of her apartment building overlooking the East River, just a stone’s throw from the iconic 92nd Street Y. We talked about the writing life and her three novels, Amy and Isabelle, Abide with Me, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge. Strout is a slow, deliberate writer, who creates messes in rough draft form and cleans those messes up as she revises, turning chaos into breathing characters and memorable stories. Shy about reading reviews and an avowedly private person, Strout spoke to Fifth Wednesday as a way of acknowledging her love and debt to the literary journals she devoured as a young writer, which she said helped shaped her both as a writer and as a reader.

FWJ: Did you conceive Olive Kitteridge as having such an intense, omni-inclusive structure when you started, or did that came organically during the writing?

ES: Once in a while something happens and it just happens accidentally and I’m so grateful, but I understood that form immediately. I think it’s because I wrote one of the Olive stories quickly, which for me meant maybe a couple of months. To me that’s an amazingly fast story, and I might even be making it up, but I mean it didn’t take me years. Some of those Olive stories took me ten years. But that one, the first complete Olive story where I saw her, where she was the main character, didn’t take me that long and I thought, Ah, okay, I’m going to write a book called the Olive Stories. Right away I understood that Olive would have a book to herself. Every story would be about Olive. As I started going I understood that nobody, including myself, would want to see Olive on every page. She’s just a lot to take. Rhythmically you have to let her fall down and rest and the reader can rest. I love point of view and I love towns so I thought, okay she can make an appearance in every story but she won’t be the main character in each story. That happened pretty naturally, which was wonderful.

FWJ: Did that first Olive story you finished make the final cut into the book?

ES: Yes. It’s the one where she steals her daughter in-law’s bra on her wedding day. And there were a number of stories—because I write all the time and I write bits and pieces, there were lots of small town stories with an older woman protagonist and they kind of weren’t working. When I found Olive I looked back at these three or four stories and I thought, wait a second, this is an Olive story.

FWJ: Which was the toughest one to write, the Olive story you really had to struggle with the most?

ES: The hardest one to write was the one where they’re taken hostage in the hospital bathroom. That was one of the ones I had been working on for years and the woman in the story’s name was Evelyn because I hadn’t yet found Olive. I had this woman stopping in the hospital with her husband and I wasn’t sure how it would play out and I couldn’t get some place with it. Then Olive showed up and it was like, sorry Evelyn, you’re not the girl. But the form of that story was very difficult. It took me years to write because I couldn’t find the form. It wasn’t until I realized that she’d been traumatized so her memories of it are the memories of someone traumatized. And when I came up with that image it seemed to me like the inside of her head had been painted with a sponge, the way kids do in kindergarten or something, sponge painting. Then I could visualize it thinking that her memory took the shape of these splotches, and I could present them in some kind of forward leaning narrative.

FWJ: She casts such a big shadow on everyone’s lives around her and I thought more than once when reading Olive about Rabbit Angstrom.

ES: Yes! I love Rabbit at Rest—the final one. I just recently went back and read them all again to see how Updike does things. It’s great how awful Rabbit is.

FWJ: They both put their sons in therapy.

ES: Right. And especially in Rabbit at Rest he’s so awful—going to bed with his daughter in-law. That was the point my father in-law put the book down and said, “This is disgusting, I don’t want to read this anymore.” I talk about it sometimes when I give a lecture, I find it so amazing that he’s my favorite Updike character. He has this heart problem and he’s driving back down to Florida or something and eating all those electric orange Cheetos and trying to play basketball, and every time he shoves more junk food in his mouth I keep thinking, don’t do that, you’re going to die. I think isn’t that interesting that I have such a response to him while at the same time he isn’t even remotely what you would call a good person.

FWJ: Updike squirreled away that little coda to the Rabbit books, a little novella about Rabbit’s son in a collection of stories.

ES: I think it was called Lick of Love. Or Licks of Love?

FWJ: You also did that with the characters from Abide With Me making a surprise appearance in an Olive story.

ES: Yes. I couldn’t help myself.

FWJ: It was fun to find them back again. Do you have any plans to bring Amy or Isabelle back?

ES: I was playing around with that the other day, with a story about Amy and her mother. But I wasn’t comfortable with it. It’s funny.

FWJ: There’s so much potential now there at the end with the new family. Have you ever gotten pressure from an agent to write a sequel or do something more Amy and Isabelle like?

ES: No. Other than everyone hoping that Abide With Me would be much more like Amy and Isabelle. People were disappointed.

FWJ: But it is similar in many ways. You gave us another town full of people with lives and back stories….

ES: I thought so too. But New York is not a place where.... Let’s just say my sense was the New York publishing world was not a place where people would be inherently interested in the struggles of a minister.

FWJ: What do you write on?

ES: I write by hand. I still do. I used to write on almost anything. But mostly notebook paper is what I like. Loose leaf. I use a pen to write and then a pencil to go over a typed page when it finally gets messy enough to the point where I can’t read it anymore, then I’ll type it out.

FWJ: Revisions by hand too?

ES: Oh yeah. It’s all by hand until I can no longer see what I’ve done. I really really don’t like to print things out. It seems so serious. It becomes more difficult then to get it back into a state of fluidity. I think of it as very malleable. I very literally like turning the page, you know, writing around the edge of the page and then I make notes, “go here, and here, here, turn it sideways and then go here.” I like mess. I’m also, maybe unfortunately, a messy person and it’s how I work. But then it reaches a point where I don’t understand what that arrow meant, go where to what paragraph? I lose things all the time, I lose pieces of writing all the time.

FWJ: Which part is most pleasurable? The first draft or those revisions?

ES: I’m pretty much a scene maker, so my favorite part is the revision where I’m feeling like I’m finally getting there, figuring out what the scene should be and it feels right. It feels energetic. That doesn’t happen on a first draft.

FW: How do you store it all? In a box or just piled on your desk?

ES: It’s everywhere. It’s terrible. It’s terribly chaotic I’m afraid. And there will come a point where I think, now wait a second, I’m getting a scene here and I’ll need to be able to see it. Then I’ll type it up, and then of course I’ll immediately mess it up as fast as I can with a pencil.

FWJ: So is revising for you expanding as opposed to contracting?

ES: Oh no. I cut and cut and cut. I write tons of stuff that just never makes it. I’ve written hundreds of pages sometimes just to get one page.

FWJ: Do you have a set amount of time for writing during the day?

ES: I wish. I used to be more disciplined about that when I had a family, a daughter and a dog, you know, going around in different circles trying to keep everyone organized. And I was teaching part time so I had to be more disciplined about when I was going to do everything. I’m not that good about it anymore. But I also used to write first thing when I got up. I lived alone for a few years and I worked late at night. I think I’m just made differently. I get a real second wind around 11 o’clock and I’m able to go back over all the stuff that I’ve done. I’ve been reading the biography Capote, and he liked to write at night. I’m always glad to read something like that because then I can go, oh yeah, me too.

FWJ: You find inspiration reading about other writers?

ES: I do. In fact I was thinking, “Why am I giving this interview if I say—which I think is honest—that I’m not comfortable being in the public?” But I love literary magazines. They’ve meant the world to me and my sense of doing this is that there might be other writers out there who are on their own and if there’s anything I can say that brings somebody a sense of hope or comfort.... I can remember being young and reading things that writers said about writing and I was so happy. When you’re a writer you live with such a private sense of alienation. And then I would just go to the library where they had them all lined up and it was sort of like going to a bakery. You find out there are other people living like that. Ploughshares is one which never took a piece but just asked me to guest edit an issue.

FWJ: Do you get a lot of moments like that, having been through the slush piles?

ES: When Amy and Isabelle was published and did well it was like a dream come true. I happened to be in the basement of where we lived in Brooklyn and I had kept all this stuff. It was pre e-mail and I had submitted everything by mail then and I had all these rejection letters, a big box of rejection letters which I had perversely kept, maybe to keep track of who I was sending stuff to. But they weren’t organized, of course, because it’s me. But I thought, Oh well, you know, now I can look at them and feel triumphant. But I couldn’t. They made me sick. I started to look at them and they still hurt my feelings so much. I just threw them away. I did eventually get very nice rejections from Dan Menaker at the New Yorker. He wrote me bigger and bigger personal rejection letters.

FWJ: Ah! The highly coveted, rarely sighted personal rejection from the New Yorker! That must have been thrilling.

ES: Are you kidding? It was amazing. Twice he called me up. One time was when I just turned thirty and he called me and the first thing he said was, “This is Dan Menaker from the New Yorker, now don’t get excited because we haven’t....” And I was like, That’s quite all right. I really was just as excited as if he had taken it. But he was basically calling me up to say keep going. That my stuff was good, he said better than 80% of the things that come across his desk so keep doing it. I couldn’t even sleep that night I was so happy.

FWJ: Did they ever offer concrete suggestions?

ES: He would. Not for me to revise and send back, but he would tell me what he thought wasn’t happening. And deep down I knew what wasn’t happening. Once I got rejections like that—they still hurt—but at least someone was in dialogue with me. Someone believed in me. He was deeply, deeply important. Then he left the New Yorker when Tina Brown came in and I had started to work on the novel so we were out of touch for about five years—plus I wrote so slowly that I only sent him a story every year, every two years anyway. Then I couldn’t get an agent for Amy and Isabelle so I sent it to him at Random House and he liked it. And that’s how that got published.

FWJ: Do you think of yourself as a funny writer?

ES: You know, I do actually.

FWJ: So do I.

ES: Well good. I think I’m hysterical. I don’t mean to be. I don’t sit down trying to be funny. My mother thinks I’m a riot. She says, “Oh Lizzie I laughed my head off, I just howled.”

FWJ: You did stand up comedy.

ES: Oh my God. I did. I can tell you what I did that for and it was really, really scary because I do have stage fright. It was back when I was not able to finish a story. I had been writing for years and years and all of a sudden I was unable to finish even a single story—I was getting ready to become a novelist really. This was right when Cuomo lost the election and Pataki became governor so many years ago.

FWJ: Were you doing political jokes?

ES: No. But it was just that night, election night.

FWJ: So it was just one performance?

ES: Well, I’ll tell you: I took a class. I was having trouble writing, which is scary, and I thought to myself because I’d done it long enough, okay I can tell I’m lying about something. There’s something I must be holding back. That’s usually true. When you get writer’s block it’s because you’re doing something false. There’s a billion ways to be false. You can be writing a story one way when it really wants to be a different way. You can be trying to protect yourself—which is even worse. Or you can be showing off or whatever. So many different ways to be false. And I was really concerned because I couldn’t finish a story. I thought what is it? What am I doing wrong? What am I holding back? And I was interested in comedy because it seemed to me as I went to various clubs in the city—which of course we didn’t have in Maine or New Hampshire or at least not the Maine or New Hampshire I came from, nor would I have been allowed to go if there were—but here I was in New York comedy clubs and people are laughing when they hear something true. And so I thought to myself, what would come out my mouth? Because you know as a writer we get to stay in the house, be real squirrelly. I wondered what would come out of my mouth if I was responsible—directly responsible—for making someone laugh. Strangers, not friends when you know what their funny bones are, but it seemed to me to be like putting myself in a pressure cooker. So I signed up for a class at the New School in standup comedy. Oh my God, it was so frightening. You’d see people outside of class in break times just eating cigarettes, and every week attendance would be smaller. But I made myself stick to it. And those of us who made it through that class—probably half of us dropped out if not more—those of us who made it through performed on the upper east side here. I wouldn’t let anyone come who knew me. I’ve never been so frightened in all my life. It was horrible how frightened I was. But I did it, and I got laughs.

FWJ: Do you remember any of the jokes?

ES: Well, what I remember is that it worked. I made a lot of jokes about hair, about my hair. I hadn’t yet written Amy and Isabelle so obviously I have a lot of issues about my hair. I made a lot of jokes about my in-laws who at that time were New Yorkers. And I made a lot of jokes about being from New England. And the truth is, honestly, until I took the class, this is how much of a WASP I am, I didn’t know I was a WASP. I didn’t even know that’s what the jokes were about really. I was just making fun of the difference between myself and my in-laws, things that they would say and do that my family would never say and do. Really what I was doing was talking about huge cultural differences. And that’s when I realized, oh, I really am from New England, I’d been so busy trying to run away from it. My instinct to do it was right, but I know it took years off my life. Afterwards the guy asked me if I’d come back and do a regular Tuesday night thing and I said, no I won’t. Because I’d be dead. Wasn’t for me. It’s on tape somewhere. Anyway, it worked for getting over writer’s block and I’ll never do it again.

FWJ: Do you carry a notebook around with you?

ES: I do. I used to be better about it. When I lived in Brooklyn I spent so much more time on the subway. It was fabulous actually when I look back now on it. I would spend hours on the subway and things would come to me with an urgency and I would write it out. I’m not the kind of person who needs a magazine or music or anything. I can just sit and stare because I have so much going on in my head.

FWJ: In the subway were you were working out your ideas in your head or listening to people talking?

ES: Both actually. There’s this story in Olive called “Starve” about a young couple. I was on the subway one day and that couple was there. The girl had on that denim jacket I used in the story—she didn’t appear to be sick at all, that was something for the story, but I saw them and she was sitting on his lap and it was so cute. She said, “Stop smelling me, I know you’re smelling me.” And then she said, “We could take a nap and that way we could stay up all night.” They were just so cute. I didn’t write it down but I remembered it.

FWJ: At what age did you start writing?

ES: At least since I was about four. I don’t seem to have a memory of thinking seriously about ever being anything else. My mother wanted to be a writer and she’s a hugely important presence in my life. Always has been. She encouraged me from a very young age and when I tell some people I was writing in notebooks at three and four, they say it’s impossible because three and four year olds don’t write. But I really do think I did. I certainly knew how to write when I got to kindergarten. I loved letters. Now that I think about it, I can remember learning to read—we were driving some place and my father said, now everyone read the signs. I remember I couldn’t read them because I was so little and so when we got home he taught me to read. What my mother would do is she would buy me notebooks and she would say, “Write down what happened today.” One time we were buying sneakers, and I remember the person who sold them to us was a man, and he was very nice, and she said, “Write about that in your notebook.” So all that started at a very young age.

FWJ: Did she get to read your books?

ES: She’s 83 years old and has read my books and has always been enormously supportive. There was a long period of time where she didn’t read anything I wrote, when I was in my early twenties and starting to get things published in literary magazines, she and my father when I sent them something would both be sort of quiet about it, so I stopped talking about it. And then eventually when Amy and Isabelle came out I sent it to her and she loved it. She’s loved all of them.

FWJ: Were you worried about her reaction at all, especially since it has such a troubled mother-daughter relationship in it?

ES: No. Nothing I do is all that autobiographical. I’m the least autobiographical writer I know. I certainly use every single thing I’ve ever lived through. But I don’t write—it would make me too nervous. I would be too self conscious to write about myself in any way that seemed like myself, so I write about somebody like Isabelle Goodrow. I did work as a secretary in a shoe mill one summer back when I was in my twenties and it came back to me when I was writing. I thought, wait a minute, here we are, back to that setting, which seemed very vivid to me, and here we had this uptight woman. She wasn’t anybody I knew in my life. She just wasn’t. She seemed very real to me and there was something very freeing about writing about her because I thought, well she’s not me. I’m not this squirrelly little uptight secretary. But then of course as the years go by you think, Oh of course that was me. I mean they were all me.

FWJ: You have a daughter so you’ve also been on the other end of that relationship.

ES: My daughter is an only child and she does have the sensibilities of a writer and we’re just very close. It happened to be that way, that we’re very similar in some ways. She grew up with me writing. She ate breakfast off manuscript stacks. And I used to think, I wonder what she’ll think of me when she realizes I haven’t done anything? That I’ve failed, only published a few small stories. But of course it never occurred to her. I was her mother. She just coincidentally turned 16 when Amy and Isabelle came out. And I said to her, this is about a 16 year old girl and people are going to..... You know. And she said, “That’s fine I don’t care.” But she’s never read any of my work, which I think is great. It’s a great choice. She wants to be a writer herself, a playwright, so it seems to me to be a very good choice since we’re so close. She doesn’t need to read my work. And she certainly wasn’t Amy. Not at all. She grew up in a city—though she does have the wild curly hair like Amy.

FWJ: Amy also has those big feet which I noticed Olive has too.

ES: I remember when I wrote that about Amy I wanted to write against the grain. I wanted her attractive in a certain way. That seemed necessary but I didn’t want to write a stereotype, so I thought, let’s have her have large feet and large hands. Conventional beauty is not interesting. At least it’s not interesting to me. I gave her the great hair and that’s enough.

FWJ: Can I ask you about the movie? Did you know it’s on You Tube?

ES: Amy and Isabelle is?

FWJ: Yes. I guess someone posted it on You Tube in little ten minute segments. Looks like they just held up a video camera to the TV while it was airing. It even has the commercial breaks.

ES: Strange. No, I didn’t know that. I know you can’t rent it—didn’t go anywhere after being on TV.

FWJ: Was it fun to have your characters interpreted for the screen?

ES: I had to think a lot about making that decision. Most writers are pretty excited to get a movie from their work, but I had to think a lot about it because I had worked so hard on that book. I’m not a fast writer and I thought a lot about it. And it was my mother, she said to me, “Do it.” Because it was Oprah’s name behind it and more people would end up reading the book. She said, “People need that book. You will reach more people with the movie who will then find the book.”

FWJ: What was your involvement with the project?

ES: They were very nice. The production company is terribly book friendly and that was one of the reasons—I mean everyone thinks, “Oh well, Oprah. You’ll just jump at the chance to let her do anything, but it wasn’t true.”

FWJ: Did she feature the book too?

ES: No. She wouldn’t feature the book. That was one of the things I negotiated, to have her feature the book on the show and she could buy the rights. But she was like, no I don’t do both. She doesn’t make the movie and also feature the book. But they really wanted it, and they were careful readers. The woman who produced it, Kate Forte, was really quite wonderful. They were very wonderful to me. They included me every step of the way. I honestly didn’t want to be included because I don’t know anything about movies and I don’t want to know anything about movies. They sent me the drafts and I’d say, sounds good. What do I know? She’d call me up and say, guess what we put in her refrigerator? Or she’d call me up and say, What do you think if they’re eating macaroni and cheese do you think they’d have carrots with it? And I’d say, sounds good to me. So they were wonderful. But ultimately the film didn’t feel connected to me. And it’s okay.

FWJ: Can you talk at all about your reaction to the film itself?

ES: Well, television is interrupted every fifteen minutes, and then there was a snow storm that night in New York so they kept cutting in. I think Elizabeth Shue is much lovelier than Isabelle Goodrow. The girl who played Amy wasn’t the actress I would have chosen, I thought there was something too hard about her, which is central to me. And you know a funny thing about that is that I don’t read reviews, I don’t read anything about myself. And I was out in St. Louis doing something and I was in a hotel room by myself. My father had just died. I was there for one night for some reason and I was upset and there was nothing in the room but TV Guide. And I looked and the movie Amy and Isabelle was coming out and TV Guide had this article about it and they interviewed the girl who played Amy. I remember looking at and thinking: don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. But I didn’t have anything else with me or whatever so I picked that damn thing up and I read it. And that girl said, Oh the clothes I had to wear were so ugly and it was so depressing, and I just couldn’t wait to get back into my trailer and put my regular clothes back on. I was so mad at her. It really hurt my feelings. And I thought, if you don’t get Amy you don’t deserve to play Amy. Welcome to the world of a lot of girls out there, honey. And I should never read anything like that.

FWJ: It seemed to me, and again I didn’t get to watch the whole movie, that the tone was off. In the book, even though I had a sense that Mr. Robertson was probably grooming Amy, I wasn’t entirely sure because it’s all filtered through her adolescent perspective. But from what I saw in the movie he seemed obviously predatory.

ES: Exactly. Exactly. Which is one reason I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it. That’s a perfect example: Mr. Robertson. I must have written 300 pages if not more just trying to understand him more and how much of his story was going to be in the book. Was he going to have a point of view? I eventually decided to just mostly have his actions, but I don’t want to write a melodrama ever and however the reader responds is fine because they’re bringing their own stuff to the character. I just didn’t want him automatically this bad person. I wanted him a person who finds himself in this situation. You know sort of like, I shouldn’t have gotten myself in that situation. And it was very very important to me that she kisses him first. Totally important.

FWJ: But he creates that moment.

ES: He totally creates that moment. And I don’t mean to suggest that he’s without responsibility but I just wanted it messy because life is.

FWJ: Do you believe fiction should be uplifting?

ES: That’s a good question and I’ve thought a lot about that recently. I think literature should make you feel less alone. And I’m not sure that would be called “uplifting.” I’ve received great comfort from some really dreary stories because they’re truthful and they’re engrossing and they give me a slice of a moment or a color that makes me feel included somehow. And I hate to diss other writers, but there’s one I’ve read for years whom I love. She has sentences that are amazing, that go for a whole page, and she can sometimes change point of view inside a sentence and she’s very good. I’ve learned so much from her. But her books became very similar, very arid. What was being presented on the page became more stuffy and the characters were so lonely that the reader wasn’t feeling better because you’ve just met another lonely person. I remember finishing the last book of hers on a subway and I thought, I don’t know what to do with this book. I don’t want to recommend to a friend or loan it to anyone. I just wanted to jump in front of a subway train. It was the first time I ever consciously thought, I don’t ever want to write a book that makes somebody want to die. I don’t want my books to do that. I think life is amazing. It’s a lot of other things too but primarily amazing and I just would like to not write about despair without a little something that also suggests were capable of something else as well.

FWJ: Olive at the end finds a little grace note with a man she meets while walking, someone she might not necessarily have imagined for herself.

ES: The conclusion that I came to was that someone doesn’t tear through life like Olive without learning something. That’s not the end of the story just because she’s learned a lot. She gets a chance to acknowledge, “I was awful to my son and you were awful to your daughter.” Life is lonely and hard and at first I hated you and we can have a drink—well, she doesn’t drink, but you know. The writer Fredrick Bush was a friend of mine and he said, you know Liz you’re a writer who has a really dark vision but you can’t stop believing that people are fundamentally good. I think it’s probably true. People will say to me, your work is so depressing and I’ll think, okay my writing is just not for you. Because I don’t think it is depressing. With Amy and Isabelle I wasn’t planning for that ending.

FWJ: It’s amazing the way that family completely opens up at the end.

ES: Yes, that claustrophobic situation they had been in. And now she’s got family and her mother’s letting her go and they’re driving off... But that came naturally. And with Tyler Caskey [in Abide with Me] I thought this man is just going to fade away, this is going to be a tale. An old fashioned T.A.L.E. This guy is going to disappear and fade off and no one is ever going to know what happened to him. But then as I got going into the book I thought, no, oh no, he’s a real member of this community. He’s a real guy and he’s going to turn back and come back. And the community is going to feel bad about what they’ve done. I want to make people feel a little better, without being a Hallmark greeting card.

FWJ: I love the names of your characters.

ES: I love names. Names are very important.

FWJ: I caught myself saying out loud Rosie Tanguay whenever she was mentioned. Quite often you refer to characters by first name and a last name.

ES: I noticed that too. I don’t know. I was just thinking about it. It might be a little New Englandy. A lot of times in New England in certain towns, half the town will have the same name. The same last name. So you’ll say, Dick Moody. You know, if you see someone. It was Dick Moody from so and so. It conveys more information. I’m kind of making this up as I think about it because I was wondering, why am I always referring to him as Avery Clark? It’s a little more formal than Avery. The narrative voice gets to stand back a little more. Amy then is a little more intimate. It also has to do with sound too, what’s the sound of the narrative. I play around with it a lot and some of them come pretty easily and some of them just don’t. I ask my mother, she’s a New Englander from a billion generations back and she just has the best names. She loves all that history. Everything I ran away from she just adores. I have a list of names but of course I lose them because I lose everything. My husband will say, do you need this? I’ll be like, oh god there’s that list of old family names and relatives that go back to the 17th century with names like Reliance and Experience. It’s wild. Just amazing. The ear is important. I read a lot of poetry, Auden and Wallace Stevens. Czesław Miłosz. I just like sounds.

FWJ: Do reviews affect you?

ES: I can’t say I’m completely ignorant of them, because you can’t be. I get a sense of what’s happening. Back when Dan [Menaker] was the general editor for all my books, I told him I’m a very excitable woman so you must not tell me. If something really great happens tell me, if something horrible happens don’t tell me. So he calls me up one day—he was furious, and he said, “Did you ever read Peyton Place?” And I said, I don’t think so. It was passed around when I was a kid I guess, but I never read it. And he said, “Some woman’s written an article that Amy and Isabelle just rips off Peyten Place and this and that.” And I said, Dan, now I’m upset. Why did you tell me this? And he said, “Because I feeling like killing her. I feel like driving out to Long Island and finding her.” I said now I want to kill her so don’t do this. Once in a while something will come my way. I was in Iowa and about to go on the radio and some woman said Oh, I thought you might like to see this. And it was a review of Abide with Me and it was terrible. It broke my heart. Obviously I know those things are out there but I just don’t want to know about them. The book is done, I did my best, and that’s it. I don’t want to know.

FWJ: Tell me about the winning Pulitzer Prize. Is that the kind of thing you know is coming ahead of time?

ES: No. No, I didn’t know at all. Maybe some people do, I don’t know. My agent and my publisher know me well enough to just “leave Liz alone. Don’t get her involved in anything.” Which is correct for me given my nature. When I won I was on the west coast giving a lecture series and when my agent finally got a hold of me she was mad. I had turned off my phone because I was giving a talk. And when I turned it on she was mad. She goes, “Where have you been you just won the Pulitzer? Liz you were the only writer in the country not glued to your computer at three o’clock.” I had no idea it was Pulitzer day. I was amazed. I mean I was thrilled, I was absolutely thrilled to get it. And I had been nominated for a National Book Critic’s Circle Award and I didn’t have any idea about that either. I was up in Maine and Dan e-mailed me and said congratulations, and I said for what? And he said, “Don’t you know you just got nominated?” I was really happy about that too.

FWJ: Are there dinners for these things?

ES: There’s a reception for the NBCC and then for the Pulitzer there’s a luncheon up at Columbia. But you don’t have to talk or anything which is fabulous. I took my daughter with me. It was great. All these little tables with little flowers on it and you just go up there and get it. I said to my daughter, isn’t this wonderful? I get to walk in this room and I don’t have to speak. I get so nervous.

FWJ: How do you do those lecture tours then?

ES: They finally, finally figured out to give me a beta-blocker. I don’t have high blood pressure or anything so I didn’t know anything about them, but then a doctor, a cardiologist finally told me, you know, we all take them. He said, When we go to medical conventions to speak the first thing it asks on the questionnaire is What beta-blocker are you on? It just slows the heartbeat. It helps tremendously because the psychological dread remains the same. You just think: I would rather die than do this. But the body responds—it stops the adrenaline from going full force It’s a life saver.

FWJ: Can I ask you about teaching?

ES: Sure. When I taught in Manhattan Community College I taught composition, and sometimes I taught a literature class. It was fun to get kids interested in reading—I shouldn’t say kids. They were adults. Young adults mostly. I got to introduce them to Raymond Carver and John Cheever, whoever I was excited about at the time. If they like you, they get excited about what you’re excited about. And I always changed it because you don’t want to get sick of whatever you’re doing at the time. It’s a danger. But then after my books came out I started to teach writing at Queens University of Charlotte, the low residency MFA program. I’ve spent the last ten years reading student writing, which is a mixed thing. On my best day I would almost feel like a radiologist. I felt like I could pick up a manuscript and pretty quickly understand what’s going on. Like, “You sure can do landscape, you’ve got that down, but what is it with people? You have a problem with people.” I wouldn’t say it that directly. Maybe. And that was sort of helpful with my own writing, knowing what I’d say to my students.

FWJ: Who are your readers?

ES: I have these little made up readers. We writers sit around all day and make things up and so you might as well make up a reader as well. I have kind of an ideal reader and I write for her. Somebody who is patient but not too patient. Open. Thoughtful. And who somehow needs the book. Especially Amy and Isabelle because I spent so many years of my young life walking through libraries pulling book off shelves and some of them would be fabulous and some of them wouldn’t be, and I just thought, what if there is some young girl in the middle of Kansas and she feels like a knucklehead all the time. She pulls this book down and feels less like a knucklehead.

FWJ: Do you get a lot of reader response?

ES: I do get reader response. It used to be letters and now it’s e-mail. Especially about Amy and Isabelle.

FWJ: Is it the mothers or the daughters writing you?

ES: Both. About equal.

FWJ: Do men write you?

ES: Not as much. A couple of men wrote and said, you’re just a man hater. And that was very painful for me because I don’t think I am at all. I like men, it’s just this book happened to be about women. And I actually like Avery Clark. It wasn’t his fault Isabelle was hung up on him, it was just time and place. More men have written about Tyler and Olive. Mostly they write nice things. There are certain people who write and say, “I really liked the book, until I got to the last story and Olive called the president a cross-eyed cocaine addict. That made me think that you’re a horrible person and I will never recommend your books.” Obviously these are hardcore Republicans and they hate me and that’s fine. Canadians got very upset with me because Olive says the terrorists on 9/11 came from Canada and down through Portland. Actually they had spent a night in Portland but not through Canada, but when 9/11 happened an awful lot of people in Maine thought that. There were all these false reports and Olive would have thought that. I can’t answer those letters because I don’t think it’s my place to give a class in narrative voice. You know, why did Raymond Carver call the African American housekeeper colored? It’s what the character feels, it’s not what Carver feels.

FWJ: Do you have a set of books that you tell young writers they need to read? Books that taught you how to write or inspired you in some way? This is that question.

ES: God, I love Hemmingway. It’s something I don’t even talk about that much anymore because a lot of women don’t like Hemmingway. He’s out of fashion and what’s the point of having the conversation except that I love him. Love Fitzgerald. I feel like I’ve learned so much from them and D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf and all the Russians because they’re not afraid of anything. And Updike of course. John Cheever’s journals. The stories and Falconer, but especially the journals are so gorgeous. They’re so honest. And I have friends who say, oh they’re just the ramblings of an alcoholic depressive, or something. But they’re beautifully written. You can learn a lot about weather. He’s so observant he just knows the wind is coming off the east and this is what it’s doing to the Hudson and you read it and think, that’s right! That’s what it’s doing. Alice Munro is huge, a huge, huge influence and so is William Trevor.

FWJ: You’ve set all three of your books in small New England towns. You live in New York but so far you haven’t set a book here.

ES: No. Not yet.

FWJ: Do you have a New York novel you’re secretly working on?

ES: I don’t know what I’m writing at the moment.

Daniel S. Libman is a past fiction editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal. His debut collection of stories Married But Looking is forthcoming from The Livingston Press in the spring of 2012.

Stuart Dybek is a Chicago writer the way the Sears Tower is a Chicago building. Sure the tower might be called something else now and there may be one or two other buildings worth visiting, but nothing else commands such an iconic presence in the skyline. To say that Stuart Dybek has stamped his own imprint on the contemporary Chicago literary scene is to understate the value and importance his tough-yet-lyrical stories hold. Sure, he also writes about other locations and other subjects, but his work and his voice are unflaggingly married to the city where he was raised, city of broad shoulders, city of Bellow and Algren and Dybek.

Stuart Dybek and I sat down in his Evanston apartment, where he splits his time between teaching at Northwestern and Western Michigan Universities, for a wide ranging conversation about being raised in Neighborhoods (Neighborhoods with a capital N), the impact of music on his writing, and what it feels like to have become the putative storyteller of an entire region.

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5Wed: I was born at Edgewater hospital.

SD: Roger’s Park. When I walked there you would have these old people speaking in Yiddish. Starting around Farwell and walking down. And I would always listen because I loved the sounds of those foreign voices. You could hear snatches of conversation and see these old, plain looking guys, but you could get a sense of this enormous, compressed history. There are some nice books written about that area. Crossing California is about west Roger’s park.

5Wed: Your knowledge of Chicago is encyclopedic and it comes out in some surprising ways. I was just rereading “Breasts,” and you have the Hamm’s beer jingle running throughout, like a musical motif. The first time my friend Lola came to Chicago she asked me why all the bars were named Old Style.

SD: That’s great! Those signs are so ubiquitous Chicagoans wouldn’t even notice.

5Wed: You have a way of writing about the city which is lyrical and poetic, but also tough and hard too. You get the nitty-gritty of Chicago while making it feel mythological at the same time. How did you come upon that? Was there a model?

SD: There really was not a model for that. This woman from NPR, Starlee Kine, just did a segment on inspiration. She went from the Caveman commercial for Geico which was actually inspired by George Saunders. She went to George to ask what his influence for “Pastorialia” was. He said one day he went to the library and read a story called “Hot Ice.” So she followed it to me and asked what was your influence on that story? I said I went to the same public library George did and found records by Zoltan Kodaly and Bela Bartok. I put them on and started to write in a way that I had never written before. It was as if listening to that music opened up some kind of folk element that I hadn’t paid much attention to, if I even knew it existed. I grew up in an immigrant family and we were all about getting as American as you can as fast as you can. It gets kind of close to bullshit when you start theorizing that there is some kind of folk memory or whether it’s just a lot of stuff you heard as a kid but forgot about, only you really didn’t. So I sat down and wrote imagery that was the same Chicago, only now it was overlaid with other images. It was kind of like I was looking at a movie. In retrospect what was most colorful and interesting when I was growing up, most serious and threatening, was the ethnicity of the neighborhood. And it wasn’t just the Slavs, but it was the fact that Spanish—especially Mexican—immigration were coming through these neighborhoods which already had waves of eastern Europeans. Even if you didn’t have the word, “port of entry” as a kid you knew you were in some sort of port of entry. On a conscious level I was really trying to imitate—as everyone does when you’re just learning—the guy from Oak Park. Hemingway. And Algren and especially Sherwood Anderson. I read Hemingway first then I read Anderson and I could absolutely see how seminal Winesburg was. It wasn’t until later that I learned he wrote those stories in a Chicago hotel. He says the inspiration for that book were the people in that Chicago hotel. And in a supreme moment of literary savvy and caginess he changes the setting from a hotel in Chicago to a small town and it changes everything dramatically.

But the music for me is more like screen music without a screen play. For me music—and I’m going back to 19th century notions of hierarchy in art which I don’t—which I pretend I don’t—believe in. Music is kind of at the top of the pyramid for me. It crosses so many boundaries that language can’t. The appeal to the emotions is so profound and it can have a kind of trance quality. There is a strong directive element to music that we don’t always think about when we listen to it. But it directs our emotions, directs our attention very powerfully in one direction or another. The other thing that happens, as anyone who has ever heard the endless accounts of someone’s drug trip, is the way the mind works. When you get a feeling, the mind rushes forward to tell a story about it, or to explain it, or to create some reason why you’re feeling it. You drop this chemical, LSD or mescaline, and suddenly you come up with a story: I’m seeing God or I’m feeling God, because that’s the feeling. It’s explaining all this supernatural feeling and the only vocabulary you’ve got is the vocabulary of religion in order to describe awe. And once you’ve entered the vocabulary of religion it’s a very short step to say, I’m god like or I’m talking to god. In a way music is like that. You hear those chords in Rite of Spring or what have you, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, and the mind wants to explain these feelings. You personalize it some way that brings your experience into play.

5Wed: I notice you have a guitar here. Do you play?

SD: I’m a terrible player. I played sax and clarinet for a long time. My first love was jazz. It opened all the doors for me. Way more than literature did.

5Wed: Who were your jazz guys?

SD: It got me early on as a little kid. I still remember the moment so vividly. I grew up in a family that actually did spring cleaning. When spring came we cleaned. We were in an apartment in Little Village and it had all these little moldings, and dust would collect in the year and I was old enough at this point to go up on the ladder, and it was my job to get the dust off the molding and so I’m cleaning the moldings all through the house and a little tube radio is playing and Louis Armstrong comes on—I didn’t know who it was. I heard tons of music at this point. We played the radio constantly. My parents loved music though neither one of them played. And man oh man, I had to come down that ladder and hear who was playing that trumpet. And so I really started to listen because I wanted that feeling back. I gradually made that evolution from Dixieland which I adored, to swing. I especially loved Benny Goodman—didn’t know he was a Chicago guy—and Ellington. My parents got me a clarinet. I wanted to play trumpet but I had a piece of tooth knocked out. Then I wanted to play saxophone but the thinking at the time was if you wanted to play reeds you start with the clarinet because then you can play anything. So I was in neighborhood combos and high school bands, and bands at the boy’s clubs but I never really had the chops that I wanted. I couldn’t play what I heard in my head. I walked around with music in my head all the time but I couldn’t play it.

5Wed: The music in your head was your own compositions?

SD: Mine. Which is how I started writing. It was far less frustrating to write. I was way more willing to make mistakes writing stories. People didn’t have to stick their fingers in their ears. And also I had developed too much reverence for music. I think when you develop too much reverence for an art form it’s actually not good for you. You want to be a perfectionist which is preventing you from making all the mistakes you need in order to learn.

5Wed: You do have a lot of music in the stories. The pianist in “Chopin in Winter.”

SD: Everywhere. Music is everywhere in my stories. I sailed with Magellan is really an homage to music. Every story has a piece of music in it. Even the title is from a song the brothers made up in the story “Live from Dreamsville.” The first story is called “Song” and it goes on like that. In some of the stories it’s more subtle. “Je Reviens” doesn’t seem like a story about music but there is this key moment where this young guy’s jazz playing uncle has been buried in the church and he is now following this beautiful woman and she stops before this terrible salvation army band in the cold, and he stops and they’re listening in the cold and he’s thinking about not following her at this moment. The Christmas carol is playing. He’s going to follow her.

5Wed: Was that intentional to structure the collection that way or was it accidental?

SD: Combination. Once I saw it I paid a little more attention to it. Which I think is how writing often happens. You’re writing and some natural pattern occurs and you perceive it. You’re creating the writing and there comes a moment where, if everything is going okay, you’re not in control of it anymore. It’s talking back to you. And that’s what you want, to have a conversation with something you’ve made but which now seems to have a mind of its own.

5Wed: Kazuo Ishiguro write very differently from you but he has the same kind of seriousness in the sentences but wild and fabulous in the story.

SD: I just kind of wandered into it. It wasn’t planned. I teach a class at Northwestern now called Writing Fabulism. And what I’m trying to do there is create some of the same possibilities I learned on my own. We read a lot of fabulists too.

5Wed: Like who?

SD: Kafka. Poe. Bradbury. Calvino. Borges. Cheever—who is really a great American surrealist. Mythology. I use a lot of poems; Rilke. The very first class I have them write what I call a “Walk through the Repository.” They have to write about all the plays and music and TV shows and movies and songs and stories they’ve read that they would consider fabulist in the broadest sense of the word. I define it as anything that’s not realism. I was a huge science fiction fan in high school—read the library out in Lawndale. Before that I got so into Greek Mythology and truth be told, although I didn’t recognize it at the time, I was an enormously religious kid. But what appealed to me most was the myth. I loved the stories in the Bible and I loved the characters. God is such a great character, such a cranky, unpredictable guy—and a guy for sure. And then the Christian stuff and the weird stories about saints. You weren’t allowed to have a literary response because you were supposed to be imbibing this moral code, but it appealed to me just like The Raven did. It was spooky. And what happened when I put that music on was I suddenly got reconnected to that other stuff. I had closed the door on all that. Writing about American Literature was about being a realist. But the thing is, the platform that I had to write about was Chicago. This was before the very handy term that no one wants to apply to themselves—apparently Garcia Marquez wanted nothing to do with it: Magical Realism. I have this very kind of realistically observed city, the neighborhood and the ethnic stuff and everything. But then there was this other element sneaking in there. And going back to Bartok and Kodaly, what I didn’t know about them at the time was that both came out of strong Western classical tradition. They understood everything about Bach to Mozart to Beethoven etc. And they were very interested in taking that step from Brahms to Modernism. Their minds were totally opened up by Debussey. But at the same time there were these national currents going through Europe. Debussey himself was not just interested in writing French music, although he was very very interested in writing “A French Music” especially in opposition to Wagner. Wagner scared the hell out of everyone because in a way he was a dead end. You couldn’t top this, you had to go somewhere else. Not that I’m a big Wagner fan I might rush to add.

5Wed: It has its moments.

SD: Yeah. But in Wagner you have these goofy, super-heated people running around with horns on their helmets. I’m not a fan of that. You can see that kind of German Nationalism popping up there. It was like Alan Lomax here in the United States taking his tape recorder and realizing that chain-gangs and cotton picking and all that had this music. He knew it wasn’t going to be there forever so he went out to record it. This had a hugely profound affect on American music. Bob Dylan is unimaginable without him having access to all that kind of stuff. So what’s going on Europe is Bartok and Kodaly were taking these early cylinders—they didn’t have tape recorders yet—into Transylvania and all these back woods places and they were able to catch the very last music that still had bagpipes in it. Before the accordion obliterated the bagpipe. If you think about the accordion and bagpipe, they can be playing the exact same notes but it’s a really different music. Bagpipe has that primitive nasal, keening sound to it and the accordion kind of tames everything. The next thing that both of those guys did is try to figure out how to make that combination of Western art music and folk elements. When you explain it out like this you make it all sound so conscious, and maybe for them because they were so damn brilliant it was. But if you think about synthesizing and start with the American realistic story, that great tradition that maybe goes back and starts manifesting itself with Chekhov, Joyce, Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway, there’s this kind of marching line into Salinger etc. And then you combine it with something else, you’re really doing something similar to what Bartok was doing. What’s attractive about doing it is that it opens up those childhood sources of deep literary enjoyment, but it also changes what you’re writing. You’re kind of mixing things together and you’re not always sure what’s going to come out of it. In a way it’s kind of a literary counterpoint. I think I was kind of wired to look for that, but once I noticed it, when I was trying to put my first book together, Childhood and other Neighborhoods, one of the things I noticed was I had a bunch of realistic stories about Chicago, and I had a bunch of these more fabulous stories. And I had a bunch of stories that weren’t set in Chicago. So trying to put the book together I thought to use Chicago as the unifying element. So all the stories that didn’t have anything to do with Chicago, they were out. Then I noticed I had an equal amount of realistic stories and fabulous stories, how about I stagger them? It turned out I needed one more fabulous story so I actually consciously wrote a fabulous story that I had some notes on just to try and complete the design. Having done that, once I began putting together Coast of Chicago I started to do the same thing. I staggered prose poem, flash fiction, short short, with longer, more conventional kinds of stories so the sense of interplay and texture was there.

5wed: When you start writing a story do you know which way it’s going?

SD: No.

5Wd: Do you start with the idea or a character or a tone?

SD: It’s different. A variety of different ways. Stories that are autobiographical you kind of start out with the anecdotal sense of the story. As you write it hopefully the anecdote generates stuff you wouldn’t have ever thought of, or the characters come to life and they turn out to be different than they actually were. A lot of times I’ll just start a story with an image. Some of my stories started out as poems which I couldn’t work out, so to kind of mess around with them I would try to put them down as prose and they took off. If only for that reason I’ll continue to write poetry because I’ve gotten so many stories from my poems. It very seldom flows in the other direction that a story becomes a poem.

5Wed: Do you have a sense of what you’re working on when you sit down to write? In other words a poem or a prose piece?

SD: Like almost everyone who writes I keep journals to sketch out ideas, capture images before you forget them. A line of dialogue here and there. And almost always these ideas are in verse. Very seldom is it sentences. I read as much poetry as I do prose.

5Wed: Are you rigid in your writing habits?

SD: No. Not at all.

5Wed: Nothing? No time set aside just for writing?

SD: I’d like to be a morning writer, I know those are good writing hours, but I just can’t make myself.

5Wed: Minimum daily page count?

SD: Nope. At one time I did but. It’s gone by the wayside.

5Wed: Are you always working on something?

SD: Yes. In fact I have the bad habit of always working on more than one thing, which I think of as a poet’s habit. It doesn’t translate well to prose. I think you’re better off highly focusing on one piece at a time, getting it done. Right now I just sent off to a publishing house two different manuscripts. It’s not a way of working I would advise people to do. A lot of times a book of poems will be ready around the same time as a book of fiction and they will come out within months of each other. I’m not exactly sure why that is.

5wed: What does a good day of writing look like versus a bad day?

SD: I think I try to write a scene. So it isn’t a page count or a word count. I think in scenes, so a good day’s writing is to get a scene done that has enough momentum to generate the next scene the next time you sit down. With a poem it’s different. Usually I’m stuck somewhere on it.

5wed: On a story do you generally know where it’s heading when you’re starting?

SD: No.

5wed: How do you know when you’re at the end?

SD: When it’s working, although there are rare exceptions to this, about two thirds through the story the ending just comes. And I think of it for a second and I try to put it out of my mind, once I know I won’t forget it. It’s as if the story tells me.

5wed: And then at that point are you writing toward it?

SD: Yes.

5wed: I was thinking about the ending to “Breasts,” and there’s no way as a reader to foresee the total shift that comes.

SD: That one I knew was coming. Maybe even as I started that story. It was the last story I wrote for that book. And my feeling—and before I finish this sentence I have to say this is a little bit more intellectual than I like to be—but my feeling at the time was that if one is really writing a novel in stories, which is how I thought of that book, you should take full advantage of the looseness of it. You should be doing something that the straight-ahead, conventional novel can’t do. And I wanted before I let that book go, to have a piece in there that did that, and “Breasts” was that piece. I had been meaning to write that story about my brother putting that shotgun through the curtained window. So in a way that wasn’t usual for me. I knew that story was going to make that huge jump back. And I wanted the reader to think this was interesting, this story with death and gore and blood in it.

5wed: And Mexican wrestlers.

SD: And Mexican wrestlers. And it’s set in a neighborhood but isn’t about this family. It isn’t about Uncle Lefty and it isn’t about these brothers and it isn’t about Sir. What’s this doing in here? And then I wanted that jump at the end. In a way, I guess what I was after, and I don’t know if it was at all fair to ask the reader to do it, is that when you have these violent episodes in your neighborhood, it almost doesn’t feel like it’s part of your life. They felt like some kind of story, some kind of weird thing. It just happens that we’re living on the same block where there are all these hustlers and people walking around with guns in their waistbands—but it would never be discussed in the dinner table. So I kind of wanted this sense of dislocation, but I don’t know if that came out. More than anything I just wanted it to be a good story.

5Wed: That was a Best American.

SD: Yeah, but that version didn’t have the ending because Tin House published it without the end. That was okay with me because number one it meant it would be different in my book and number two I kind of wanted to see how it read without the ending. There was a temptation once they hit that wrestling thing in the bar to leave the ending off. I prefer it with the ending but I’m okay without.

5Wed: Did you worry the title would turn people off?

SD: “Breasts” came from a short short which I never bothered to finish because it turned into that story. But the original short short was I walked into a neighborhood bar one time, and there were two guys sitting at the bar and one of them had a wife beater on. He had a big hairy, loose chest. And the other guy, kind of a Mafioso type, was goofing on him. He was talking to the bartender about the best tit in the bar, and he was feeling him up and everyone was laughing uproariously. I thought it was quintessentially neighborhood. This is the kind of humor that cops have, and it might be gross, but if you grew up in a Chicago neighborhood this is what qualifies as funny. I always just wanted to capture that. One of the things that gave me permission to call it “Breasts” was I knew from the start it wasn’t a Playboy magazine story about who has got big boobs—as a matter of fact I hate centerfolds. That notion of femininity is a huge disservice that’s been done to everybody. I could care less about big tits. I guess some guys are tit men and some guys are not. But it struck me as so funny in the bar. And knowing that was where the breasts were coming from kind of said, okay put that title on this story.

5wed: What about revisions?

SD: I revise endlessly. Rough drafts are like flaying yourself alive. Miserable. It’s kind of like music where you’re making a helluva lot of noise and people have to plug their ears. A rough draft falls so short of the imaginative bursts you’re having. Revision for me isn’t fixing the language, it’s putting layer upon layer upon layer of imagination, so that what’s on the page becomes as rich as the imaginative experience.

5wed: I think you can really see that in your work, especially in something like “Nighthawks,” which has so many levels of references you can almost see brushstrokes.

SD: That story was highly dependent upon language. The more language dependent the story becomes usually means it’s less heavily plotted. You don’t have plot to rely on or the pacing a plot allows for. It’s like taking melody out of music. Or representation out of painting. It immediately makes you much more dependent on other elements of the art form. So if you’re only suggesting a plot like “Nighthawks” does, for me it puts much more emphasis on the language. The prose rhythms become hugely important.

5wed: Do you read out loud when you work?

SD: Yeah, I’m not even aware that I’m doing it. Every so often I’ll take a trip with a fishing buddy or something and I’ll hear from the next room, “Will you Shut up!” And I’m, “Oh shit, am I doing it again?” But that’s where the prose rhythms come from. I tell my students to do that. That a story is never done until you read it out loud to an empty room. It’s a great way to edit a piece too.

5wed. Your ear will catch stuff that your eye misses.

SD: Exactly.

5Wed: So since you brought up teaching, you taught Iowa?

SD: Yes. I love teaching there.

5Wed: There in particular or anywhere?

SD: Well, anywhere. But I had a class in Iowa in particular that was just amazing. I had students in it that I love reading today. When people ask me what I’m reading I say Sara Shin-lien Bynum, ZZ Packer, they were so good. I could name other names too.

5wed: Do you have one of those quintessential writer’s stories about going to Iowa as a student?

SD: Probably five or ten of them. The reason I’d gone, I didn’t know much about workshops because this was pre-workshop culture. There might have been four, five programs when I applied. I had been reading the Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnel, giving it as presents I loved it so much. And then I read a book that just knocked me on my ass, called Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J Henry Waugh, Prop., best book about baseball I ever read in my life by Robert Coover. I found that both these guys were teaching at Iowa. I was in the Virgin Islands teaching middle school. I’d never met a writer and had only published my first story in the magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy after it had been rejected by every literary magazine I knew about, which was maybe 25 of them. I applied to Iowa and Utah and Denver and got into them all, but because Coover and Kinnel were in Iowa I went there even though I did not want to go back to the Midwest. When I got there both of them had left. I didn’t know who to take. They just put me in a class with a guy with this wonderful looking, pretty worn face named Richard Yates. I didn’t know a thing about him and I didn’t have a story ready either. I told Yates I was working on something and I had never had a story critiqued so would it be okay if I just used the story that had been published? When it was time to critique the story hardly anyone said anything about it. He said this is really a beautiful story and if you guys don’t want to talk about it, I’m just going to read some parts of it out loud. First part he started reading I cringed because there had been this book I had loved when I was a case worker in Chicago and used to trade books with this buddy of mine who was also a case worker and who liked to read like I did. And I had a shock of recognition when I read that book about an image of children looking for a cool place under the covers with their feet, and when I sat down to write my story I stole that. And I couldn’t remember how badly I had stolen it and I felt so damn guilty as I was listening to it, that I rushed back home. I still had all the books that meant something to me packed in beer boxes which I hadn’t yet opened. I remembered exactly what book I had stolen it from. I found the beer box with that book and I opened it up, and it was Revolutionary Road.

5Wed: Oh no!

SD: And I did not realize it, I was so stupid that I didn’t even know the guy I was—

5Wed: Had he recognized it?

SD: On some level he must have. Later when we became friends I asked him about it and he said, “Oh no no no, I just liked the way it sounded.”

5Wed: Sure he did. He wasn’t that well known then, right?

SD: Not at that time. And after that I read everything he ever wrote. And what an amazing, fortunate experience it was to have Dick Yates as a teacher. He was a lovely, lovely man. Just a tremendous writer.

5Wed: You’re such a Chicago writer and I think it’s noteworthy that I, a Chicago reader, can’t tell if you’re a Cubs fan or a Sox fan. And I’m afraid to ask. Instead, can you talk about being selected for the One Book Chicago program? That must have been amazing.

SD: It was amazing.

5Wed: When I read the stories in the One Book edtion it occured to me what a perfect choice the city had made—but also kind of a brave one. Those weren’t booster stories by any stretch. For instance you have that one line criticism about the first Mayor Daley.

SD: One way to judge a politician is by who he delegates authority to. Does he micromanage or having made a good decision does he let it go? I’m not deeply informed enough to make generalizations about anybody’s administration, but I do know that one thing Ritchie Daley did was find Mary Dempsey. Long before my book was the One Chicago pick, Harper’s Magazine had their 150 year anniversary. And you’d think if someone would celebrate this occasion it would be New York. And maybe they did. But Mary Dempsey found all the Chicago area writers who had written for Harpers and we had a big celebration right here in the public library. From that moment on I thought, oh my god we have really got a creative thinker in the driver’s seat. Program after program started coming out of that library and we were the envy of the nation. Daley, to his enormous credit, just started building libraries, and in down at the heels neighborhoods. He found out if you put a library in a neighborhood the neighborhood gets better. And these libraries weren’t just sitting there empty—they were keeping track of who was coming in for after school programs, for example. So to understand the One Book program you have to put it in the context of a very active library staff. To get back to that question about a story like “Blight,” and why would he want to celebrate a story like that. See, it isn’t that he wanted to, but he knew to let Mary Dempsey go. He knew to not mess with it. It was special. The other thing is, I don’t know if you ever met him, but he is one hell of a raconteur. That guy can really tell a story. I used to do Christmas programs that the mayor’s office would sponsor every year with kids who really came out of as poor a background as you can find in the city, and it was really amazing to see him go into those programs—on a day full of appointments—and how spellbinding he would be when telling about the kinds of Christmases his family spent. I’m a ways away from your question but the bottom line is: this is a city that likes a good story. Where I grew up in Pilsen and Little Village we came out at night and sat on pipe fences and we just told stories. I joined the Peace Corp years later and you get to know each other by telling stories—it was the first time I realized that all these stories I took for granted out of the neighborhood were interesting to people. And entertaining. They were a kind of currency. It struck me that that other people who had good stories were from like Brooklyn and the Bronx. It seemed to me to be a real urban thing. Later on when I got to travel I realized that wasn’t necessarily the case. Some of the best story tellers I ever met were in Alaska, where the sheer isolation made them really good story tellers.

5Wed: When you were “the One Book guy” what sort of transaction was that between you and the city? Do you get a sash?

SD: Having done a thousand readings in all sorts of settings, there just wasn’t anything quite like that. The library had it figured out at that point. Starbucks was participating—you’d walk into a Starbucks and there would be passages from your book. There were readings everywhere, study groups. Mini classes like at DePaul and other places. There was an enormous amount of energy put into bringing the city together the way One Books are supposed to: everyone reading the same book and talking about it. I had never really quite realized until that moment the book was an opportunity for people to talk about their own experiences in the city. And I think because Chicago has its own tradition like Shelley, Keats, and Byron. Chicago has Algren, Terkel, Bellow. I’m sure other cities have there writers but you don’t think of a Philadelphia tradition or a Pittsburgh tradition or a St. Louis tradition

5Wed: New York tradition just becomes the national culture.

SD: That’s exactly right. Exactly. So Chicago’s got this unique literary culture, and when you create a One Book program and pick a Chicago book for it, you’re really tapping into that energy. The other thing Chicago has is a lot of classes in the school system on Chicago literature. St. Ignatius had a wonderful one. Still does. Bill Savage at Northwestern teaches one. But there are at least a dozen, and some of them have been going for a really long time and you just didn’t know they were there. These classes make student readers see the city through a different lens by creating permission to say, what happens in my backyard is important and I could write about this. There is a kind of a synergism there between all those resources and contexts.

5Wed: What kind of relationship do you have with the covers of your books?

SD: I was enormously fortunate with that. My editor had a lot of clout. She’s an iconic editor named Elizabeth Sifton. Possibly the first, I’m not sure about this, but certainly one of the first women to have her own imprint at Viking. And I just followed her from house to house. She allows me to pick my own covers. The original cover for Coast of Chicago—not the one on the Picador edition—that original cover is just a bridge over the Chicago river. It’s a painting I saw and I knew it was exactly what I wanted because instead of the coast of Chicago being a kind of glamorous lake view of the city, it was this river that we’d made run backwards—plus it was nocturnal.

5wed: Do you enjoy doing that?

SD: Yes! It’s pretty unusual that you get a chance to do it. A lot of times when a writer picks an epigraph you’re trying to give the reader a little handle on the book as well. You’re kind of setting a mood which I think is important, though it’s not a predominant aspect of writing in the 20th or 21st century. I think tone is generally much more important. But I’ve always loved the mood stuff which goes back to fabulism; Poe, 19th century, Hawthorne, Melville. Those guys are all real mood writers. A cover can kind of suggest that.

5wed: How quickly or easily do titles come to you?

SD: Well.... I mean they come or they don’t. They’re hugely important and when I get a hold of one it becomes generative.

5wed: Do you ever start with title?

SD: Maybe so. The Coast of Chicago is a title I carried around for years. I just knew that was a good title.

5wed: Which stories do you look back on with the most affection?

SD: You come to realize some of them you got more of than others. There’s no literary reasons. Where were you? Which secrets were you working out? Stories are often coded. But the real answer is I kind of forget them after I write them. I don’t really think about them that much and the only thing that really gets me back to them—I used to do a lot of readings but I don’t really do that much any more. And so there was this different relationship with this piece you had written that now you want to try and make into a reading. It’s not a performance—I’m not a performance artist. So you have this relationship with a narrow range of stories, stories people would laugh at that you can read in a half hour. A story like “Hot Ice” was always too long, but a story like “We Didn’t” was almost the perfect length and it had funny stuff in it. Because that was one of the stories that started as a poem it had a very strong cadence to it which you could, if you wanted to, ham it up in a reading. A story like “Life In Dreamsville” could be read in 25 minutes and it had a lot of dialogue and funny stuff. I love stories that go from funny to what in a sonnet is called “a turn.” And in fact in that story I would call it a turn on the reader. That relationship with the story was sometimes actually more of a relationship with the reading experience.

5Wed: Do you do signings?

SD: Sure.

5Wed: Do you enjoy them?

SD: Mmmm.... Yeah.

5Wed: Do you have a set of things you always write or—

SD: You know Don Justice just asked me that. The poet. Do you know him?

5Wed. Yes. Not personally.

SD: He was one of my teachers at Iowa. I loved him. He was one of the best teachers I ever had. And years later I invited him to do a reading and he said, “You know I never know what to write. What do you write?” And I said, “You’re asking me what to write in a book?” And he said, “Yeah, I really never know.” I said I always like to have a little conversation if I can. If there’s time. I’ll ask, do you write? And if they say yes, I’ll say what to you write? Well, I write poems. So then I’ll write in the book, “Best wishes for your own poetry.” Or if they say, I write stories, I’ll say, oh yeah? About what. Oh, about fishing. I live in Michigan and I like to fish. Sometimes people will tell me they’re from Chicago and I really nailed this or that. I’ll write, “To my homie,” something like that. If I’m doing a Coast of Chicago reading in Colorado I’ll write, To so and so here on the Coast of the Rockies. After awhile, to make it entertaining for yourself to come up with different things. Every so often someone will come with something they want you to write and you can kind of goof on that a little bit. But there are those days when you’re just blank and you just write, “Best,” or “Hope these stories please you.” Which I really genuinely mean too.

5Wed: Who are your writers?

SD: Mona Simpson once answered a question like that by saying, when you name a writer it sounds like you’ve read everything by that writer, but sometimes you’re only talking about one story. Or she said, sometimes it’s only one paragraph. I thought that was so smart, so right. For me it’s Calvino. I love Invisible Cities. I’ve taught that book and read that book over and over and over again. Joyce. But again it’s “The Dead,” It’s Dubliners, It’s parts of Ulysses. And wishing he had written more stuff like that, as great as Finnegan’s Wake might be. A handful of Hemmingway stories. When that guy was on he was really on, but he became so mannered. The writer that I’ve read everything by and love everything by without exception is Isaak Babel. I reread him as much as anybody that I’ve read. A brilliant writer whose life was cut short by Stalin. The compression in his writing—even in translation, the vividness of his prose comes through.

5Wed: Have you seen your own work translated? What’s that experience like?

SD: The relationship with the translator is great. They’re some of my dearest friends.

5wed: You have a lot of contact as they work?

SD: The writer who translates me is Motoyuki Shibata, who has become the premier translator of American in Japanese. He’s become one of my best friends. I love him dearly. Thanks to him and only to him really everything I’ve written is in print in Japanese.

5wed: What was the most surprising thing he’s asked you?

SD: Oh you know, every so often it’ll be some kind of highly idiomatic phrase. Pieces of eight comes to mind. I can’t even remember what story uses that phrases. Maybe it was “Bottle caps,” a little short short in Coast of Chicago. But he knows more about American Literature than I’ll know in ten life times. There aren’t too many questions he has.

5wed: Do you feel like your part of a literary scene of any kind?

SD: I have a lot of buddies who write but I don’t think of us as a scene. I don’t really think that’s much of a Chicago thing.

______________

Daniel S. Libman’s debut collection Married But Looking has just been published from Livingston Press. He is a past winner of a Pushcart Prize and Paris Review Discovery Prize, and served as Fifth Wednesday’s first guest Fiction Editor.

I first met Richard Bausch at a minor league baseball game in Beloit, Wisconsin. Richard was serving as Mackey Chair of Creative Writing at Beloit College and I had driven up from near Rockford, Illinois with my family to see the Snappers. A crowd of academics — undergrads and professors — hovered around the writer, who was as interested in talking about the prospects of the Snappers as he was about our families or literature or which vendors had the better brats. It was no surprise that at a recent AWP in the bowels of a Chicago mega-hotel, the line to speak to Richard at a signing table snaked endlessly down the aisle — also no surprise that this line moved glacially as Richard heard out anyone who came to talk for whatever length his interlocutor wanted, swapping book recommendations, perusing cell phone snapshots of kids, sharing old jokes. Maybe it’s because the characters in a Bausch story are immediately recognizable — they’re our neighbors, and family members, they’re us last week and probably us again tomorrow — that one feels an instant connection, a chumminess upon being in the writer’s orbit even the first time. You want to ask, “How did you know?”

Something of a departure for Taking the Fifth, this conversation was conducted solely through email, a free flowing, formless chat taking place over several months during the first half of 2012. Mr. Bausch is famously generous with his time and support, as these emails attest.

From: FWJ

At AWP in Chicago you were on a panel purporting to be about humor in literature but ended up being a raucous joke-fest. I myself have trouble remembering jokes and tell them poorly, but I’ve been repeating (stealing) some of the ones you told, including the one about removing drunken Canadians from a swimming pool. Heard any good jokes lately?

From Richard Bausch

I just heard about a paranoid dyslexic who was afraid he was following someone.

From: FWJ

How difficult is it get a humorous conversational voice on to the page so that the reader can hear the right cadences, the right inflections? I'm thinking of stories like Belle Star or even Voices from the Other Room where the tone of the dialogue seems as important to the reading as the words.

From Richard Bausch

I wish there was some clear answer to this; but the honest truth is that I don't know. Professional comics use trial and error — they produce the material and then go try it out, to see if it works, or if they can discover a sharper way to make it work. Writing it, I put down what I hear people say, and then I try to make sure nothing is wasted in it, that each line is doing more than one thing, but beyond that, it's all feel, all just trying to make it as sharp as you can, while still convincing a reader that it could happen to be said in the way that you hear it said. I know intellectually that all comedy involves incongruity, exaggeration, and surprise, and that the absurdity of our existence often produces all three elements. But I don't really ever use any of this, and I doubt anyone who is working a comedic scene does, either — not even in revision. It's all from the feel of it.

Best,

R

From Richard Bausch

When I said I write dialogue as I hear it, I meant as I hear it in my head, making it up. I have a pretty good ear for how people talk but I never took down anything I ever heard, nor did I ever intentionally 'overhear' anything. I do not believe in the writer as scientific observer of his fellows like some scientist from another world making notes. I hate that notion, as I hate the idea a lot of non-writers have that everything they say around me is being recorded for later use. I almost never consciously use models — in fact it has only happened three times in my writing life: 1.) My father for the grandfather in 'What Feels Like The World' (and that was just temperamental in that the character exhibits a tender gingerliness when dealing with his granddaughter's grief and her personal life, exactly as my father always was with his children when it came to their private being); 2.) A dear friend of mine for the young man in "Police Dreams" who's wife leaves him; and finally, with this new novel I'm working on, I've used aspects of my wife's life in the world for my female protagonist; that is, her practical life, the travel and the schools, not the personal experience of the character, which is made up and is horrific.

In answer to the present question, my friend Richard Ford once said this in a joint interview we were doing, and I deeply concurred: "If you are another writer and you write a negative review of a book of mine, you have made an enemy for life." I reviewed books for years, for several papers (The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Washington Post, Canada's Globe and Mail), and with each of those editors I had an agreement, that they give me enough lead time to back off a book I didn't like. I did this several times, with books by John Wideman, John Irving, William Trevor and others — each time with the observation that I was not the writer to review the book, that it should go to a reader who was more sympathetic to what was being attempted. I have always believed that silence is best in this arena, if you are another writer. A long time ago I read a quote — don't remember the source: "The writers who survived are hungry; the ones who did not were delicious." And as Ford said once in a letter and I think also in print, the writers of our particular generation have not wasted a lot of time pissing on each other's shoes, the way the ones directly before us did. We are colleagues, and the woods are burning all around us, and there is no bitch goddess, to use Mailor's phrase: there is only the work and the will to do it well, and nothing to protect except the time to do it in, and nobody anybody needs to be warned about, either.

Best,

R

From Richard Bausch

I want to be reviewed promptly, and when I'm not I think it can do damage to the book's sales, and it's happened to me a couple of times, too. But I don't think bad reviews hurt sales. Hell, the single most pilloried and ridiculed novel in the last fifty years was on the bestseller list for something like six years. I won't say the name of it, but it had the word bridges in the title and believe me it is decidedly unmemorable. I don't know what sells books other than word of mouth, and, say, an entire conglomerate juggernaut of public industries — television, newspapers, radio, the whole media complex, announcing its imminent arrival, a la the Potter books. Neither praise nor blame affects my writing; they can affect my life and my blood pressure. But they have no effect on the writing, and there is nothing I can learn from a review, which is mostly plot summary, and talking about matters I have been over so many times I can quote them. Reviews are for readers, and that really has to do more with subject matter than any qualifiers one finds in them. Regarding the last part of the question, no, I have never confronted a critic or another writer about anything they have said about my writing. I don't read the reviews, in fact; I get them in a kind of one word summary: bad, mixed, good, rave, over the top rave. I want them, I want as many of them as there are papers that people still read, or organs of communication that people attend to, and I'd like them to be over the top, all of them. Most of them have been quite good (in the UK, with the publication of PEACE, they were apparently amazing, and I saw some paragraphs from them and they were deeply gratifying) but I'm still struggling with the same problems of seeing every way the prose lines fall short of my hopes for them, how much they keep sounding like the uninspired rattling of daily ME, and how much there still is to do. My advice to young writers is that they try to develop the habit of not reading the reviews — good or bad. Hemingway said "If you believe them when they say you're good, you have to believe them when they say you're bad." I say, "If you pay attention only to the good ones, you're no different than a cheap dictator demanding that only good news be brought to him." So the best policy is the one that makes sense: since there's nothing to learn from them —and there is truly nothing to learn from some stranger making a single reading of something you've been through nine thousand times — then leave them alone.

Best,

R

From Richard Bausch

I never said it as something to do as a routine before work; I must not have been clear enough. What I meant was that if one can develop the habit of reading several books simultaneously, just going through the days, that this was a good thing. It's a good thing mostly because you can get to more of what there is to read. That first. At least you get to taste more. Also, I believe it keeps you from being too imprinted by what you are reading when you try to write — or the flow, at least for me, seems better for all the voices gliding through. Presently, on my night stand: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ford's Canada, Caro's book on Lyndon Johnson, Strout's Olive Kitteridge, Styron's Set This House on Fire, Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk, Gide's The Counterfeiters, Welty's Delta Wedding, Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Edwin O'Connor's The Edge of Sadness, Mark Van Doren's Great Poems of Western Literature, Vance Bourjaily's The Hound of Earth, Mark Strand's New Selected Poems, Peter Taylor's Collected Stories, The Henry plays--IV 1 and 2; V; and VI 1, 2 and 3; Cesare Pavese's Selected Works, and Ann Beattie's Mrs. Nixon. Several of these I'm reading for a second or third time (the Tolstoy, Styron, Strout, Maxwell, O'Connor, Gide, Van Doren, Beattie — am reading them again because I enjoyed them so much in previous trips through. I read a little in each one of these at some point in each day, and as I finish them, I put them back on the shelf. (This winter I read all those Roth short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis.) Obviously I do not watch a lot of TV. Sporting events, occasionally — baseball if The Nationals are on; the last games of playoffs, like that. I watch movies — usually a lot of them in a year, sometimes one an evening. I also play guitar and harmonica and I will spend a while playing and singing, most days — will still go on the net to look at tablature and figure out how to play a song.

Best,

R

From Richard Bausch

I'm always proud of and happy about the accomplishments of pals, but never feel that I wish I'd written any of it. It's strange, I guess. I feel glad of it, glad it's there. It validates the whole enterprise for me, and makes me happy to go about my own work. Especially when I know I have their respect. I think one of the big reasons I kept writing after those initial forays into pretense in my late teens early twenties, was the idea of gaining the good opinion of writers I knew of. As if we would all be in some beautiful contemporaneous place together. This sounds a bit overly romantic, but I was seventeen and eighteen and nineteen. Over time of course, the matter of it is simply collegial — colleagues. I have made many good and dear friends AFTER I came upon the work. Oh, many. And they are as dear to me as anyone on this earth.

We are this moment packing stuff in preparation for the packers from the moving company —who are due here tomorrow. Agh! So I may be out of touch for a few days. A lot of going around to come through July 4th. But I will be checking email when I can.

Best,

R

From Richard Bausch

I am less interested in setting, really, than a lot of writers. For me, the landscape is often interior, the place is the psyche. I've set stories and novels in a lot of different locales, my fictional Virginia town POINT ROYAL is often the place where characters of mine live, but I have also set stories and novels in Duluth, Minnesota (Mr. Field’s Daughter), Africa, The Canary Islands, England, Virginia and Mississippi (Hello to the Cannibals), New York (''Once in a great Northern city there lived an old man..." The Last Good Time), Chicago (Violence), Wyoming (Rebel Powers), Memphis (seven of the stories in Something is Out There), and Italy (PEACE).

Best,

R

From Richard Bausch

The setting where I write is fortunately not really an issue. I trained myself unwittingly to be able to work anywhere because I HAD to be able to work in different settings (we lived in 13 places in 11 years at one point). So I need only a little room, with a table and plenty of pencils and paper, and a computer. Usually, too, now, I have a lot of books around me as well. In Orange, I'll have a little separate building in the back yard, with electricity and an air conditioner in the window. I'll put books in there and the table and the other things, and there may be room for a day bed, which I have had the last few years, mostly to throw stuff on and to prop up my guitar, so I can turn from the desk and play and sing a little for a break when I feel like a break.

It promises to be a good place for working. We'll see. I have sometimes ended up sitting at the kitchen table of various houses, in a T-shirt, with bare feet, and a pad and pencil. Or my little netbook. And there have also been times when I worked on stories while lying in bed.

About our move. I'm in Vermont, at Vermont College of Fine Arts, doing a five-day residency. Everything we own is locked up in a truck on its way to Orange from Memphis. Lisa's at the rental house setting up utilities and buying new kitchen table and chairs and sleeping on an air mattress. The truck is supposed to arrive tomorrow in the morning. I don't get back to Orange until late Tuesday night.

See ya,

R

From Richard Bausch

I never gave signing books much thought. The only negative thing for me is always the names —people walk up who have a perfect right and reason to suppose that I will remember their names, and for some reason, the name will not rise in my mind. Just will not. I can quote large passages from Shakespeare and from other writers and poems in entirety — long poems — and I sing maybe 200 songs and know the lyrics for and sing for myself maybe another hundred, and I know just about every joke ever told — it is nearly impossible to tell me a joke I haven't heard — and for some damn reason I cannot hold a name in my head. They go in and fall out the back. So there is always anxiety about that when I'm signing books. But I never mind signing them, and am always a little puzzled when people seem apologetic asking me to do so. So, if I had a protocol wish, it would be that people say their names as they come up. And of course this is too much to ask, since the recognition is clearly there with the face. But it is no burden at all signing books. Copy after copy being signed is also copy after copy being sold. And if you don't sell the books the ones who publish them don't keep publishing them. I have no set phrases signing — I say, "With Pleasure," or "In Friendliness," or "Gladly," or "With good hopes," sometimes "With Good hopes for your work and real life, too." If I know the person, and know something about him/her, I will speak to that, whatever it is. Regarding the last part of the question, I don't have any thoughts at all on what book owners owe me, or what I owe them. Nobody owes anybody anything in the exchange, except politeness, graciousness. What we all owe each other anyway.

And there's nothing I can think of as an ideal question. I will say that I tire of my own voice in interviews. Which is probably healthy and good.

Best,

R

On a warm, September afternoon in DeKalb, Illinois, Fifth Wednesday Journal got to spend an hour speaking with writer Ana Castillo. We sat on a couch in the Holmes Student Center of Northern Illinois University, surrounded by the buzz of student activity. We talked about Chicago and the southwest, and the amazing genre defying career she’s had, having published poetry, short story collections, essays, memoir, novels, and even theater pieces. We began with the important role “place” plays in her writing.

FWJ: You’re that rare artist completely associated with a specific region, in your case the American southwest generally, New Mexico specifically. But you’re from out here originally.

AC: Chicago born and raised. I actually moved to New Mexico twice, most recently just seven years ago when I got a homestead. The first time I moved was years ago in the nineties, I moved to Albuquerque on my own and I lived there a few years. I wrote So Far From God and I finished my book Massacre of the Dreamers. My family was based here in Chicago, and my mother’s health was starting to decline. She was needing someone to care for her, so I moved back with my son and spent ten years here. I was teaching at DePaul for five years. These winters were getting to me and I started thinking about New Mexico again.

FWJ: It’s almost Texas where you’re at, right?

AC: I’m right on the border of Land Management. It’s almost Texas, but El Paso, Texas, and El Paso almost considers itself part of New Mexico because El Paso has been so disenfranchised by the rest of Texas. But they don’t have the regulations that New Mexico does in terms of keeping the adobe atmosphere. I live out in the desert so it’s totally like a free for all. It’s growing, but it has the New Mexico landscape: old buildings, a lot of stucco, a lot of adobe. I purchased a stucco house that looks adobe-ish, but I actually made the little chapel out of adobe on my property. It was featured in Real Simple magazine when I first did it because they thought it was interesting. Some people have an alter in their house and here I go making 1,500 adobe brick chapel. New Mexico really is a place where people feel—and this sounds hokey or new agey to say, but there is a spiritual connection that people have or feel in that landscape. Maybe as a fellow Chicagoan who spends time there you can appreciate it.

FWJ: Absolutely. New Mexico just feels different from everywhere else.

AC: Yep. But you have to spend some time there to get it. You have to give it a chance and somehow or other it calls you back. I thought I would never go back, but I started having dreams about a particular place, and it wasn’t Albuquerque. It took me awhile, but I figured out it was Mesilla, New Mexico. So I looked there first but the problem was it was becoming.... Well, it didn’t exactly become another Santa Fe but it was starting to then, and realty was through the roof. So I ended up getting this place out in the desert that nobody wants to go to, but I got that connection again, and got away from the winters and it’s inspiring me again to do what I do.

FWJ: When you were writing So Far From God were you teaching at the University of New Mexico?

AC: I never really “taught taught” at UNM, I did do the graduate creative writing summer workshop with Tony Hillerman. I was doing the poetry part of it and I did that for two years. And I also taught some out of the English department as an adjunct but I was never officially hired.

FWJ: Had you not found New Mexico what do you think you would be writing about? Would the Chicago part of you been more prominent in your work?

AC: I had been living in California for many years, maybe ten years in total. And in California you have to find your bearings about what to write because there is so much going on, so many different parts of it. You go to a place like northern New Mexico and at that time you could still find a lot of old families living in original family homes because not much had changed. When I first got there I did have another novel in mind, which would have been part of my own history, my own travels, Chicago. I’m one of those writers who gets affected by place immediately. As a poet and as a fiction writer and even a non fiction writer, place hits me. In one case, I started a story and when I had to move and go someplace else my characters had to move too, and go with me. I had to figure out, Why did they move? I had to give them a reason because I have to write in that ambiance. This might be changing for me now that I’m older and there is more memory for me than new things. When I first got to Albuquerque I was working on a novel that I intended to have take place in Chicago even though I had been living in California. And I was starting to look at the Chicago that I know, the one I grew up in. But that place, New Mexico, it hits you like a ton of bricks. It only took me about a month to get started and then I finished the novel in about six months.

FWJ: And then how long did you spend revising So Far From God?

AC: The novel that you see is the one I wrote with almost no changes. Very little editing. The only thing that came later was the last chapter. I added that after I turned the book in. I ended up doing that because I had written two novels before, but never one that was on contract with a publisher and an editor. Norton had asked me for an outline and I had never done that either. So I said, “Yeah, sure I’ll give you an outline.” I wrote it, and chapter ten has this very happy ending. And at the time I was going through all this stuff, I didn’t get the teaching job I thought I would have and so everyone died at the end of the novel. My agent called me and said, you know you promised them a happy ending. So I added that last chapter. And I don’t think they even saw that original version without the ending—but what you see there is just basically what I wrote out the first time.

FWJ: Is that typical of your process, that the first draft is close to the finished product with little revision?

AC: No. No, it’s not. The newest novel that I just completed which is going to Random House, I started in 2007, and I had many of life’s challenges that have just derailed me. It was going to be an entirely different book in every sense of the word. It’s evolved into something else. It was going to be a historical novel, it no longer is. It was going to have different characters. There is a little seed of truth, a little tiny kernel that I started out with that’s still there. I might have done a million drafts on this one.

FWJ: It seems like stuff in the real world directly impacts the things that happen to your characters. It doesn’t just affect your ability to write, but it literally alters what you’re writing about.

AC: Yes. And I would say that layering and going back and doing that finessing is much more typical of my writing process. I would love to finish the rough draft and send it out and have the publishers say, “Hey great! We want it.” But that doesn’t happen, unfortunately. That comes with the territory. I have my own standards so way before anybody else reads it I’ve gone through dozens of drafts. This book for example that I just turned in, which evolved from something totally different—nobody had read it until it got to that point. I had a two book contract with Random House and the second book was ‘whatever.’ It’s going to be a novel, whatever. Well, I had an editor that bought the two books, but with the horrible plunging of our economy and with the reductions of most industries, she unfortunately was let go. She was the original person who bought the books, who I had pitched the ideas too. Now she’s gone. About a year and a half ago I submitted the book I had written to a new editor, one I had no relationship with, and she gave me a bunch of notes with a bunch of directions she thought the book could go, which was like basically giving me an overhaul. So I said, okay, and I went off earnestly with those notes.

FWJ: Do you take those notes seriously?

AC: Oh yeah. Yes I do. When I hear my colleagues whine and complain about the notes they get....

FWJ: I’ve heard close editing like that didn’t even exist anymore, gone with Max Perkins.

AC: It definitely still exists. No editor is going to publish a book with her signature on it without her feeling good about it. In fact, I have a friend who is with another well known publisher and she came to one my memoir writing workshops which I do that are open to the public. And I thought, this is interesting, because she’s a published novelist. Why is she coming to my workshop? She must be in trouble. Sure enough, she says, I just got eight pages of notes from my editor, single spaced, and I’m just going to throw the whole thing out... on and on. “And now I’m just going to write something else. I’m going to write my story, my memoirs. Okay, do what you gotta do, but eventually you’re going to have to go back there. And once she said that, I was thinking, well I got 11 pages from my editor and I didn’t even know my editor. I knew my friend’s editor and I didn’t even know my own editor. But still I did take those notes very seriously. I had another conversation with the first editor, the editor of record, and I had yet another conversation with my new agent even though she has nothing to do with that particular book. And so all this is to say that yes, I do take ALL those notes seriously just as I take my career very seriously. I may have started out as a renegade, protest poet believing no one was ever going to publish me. But I also fought for people like myself, including all poets, to be published. To be taken seriously. To have our work out there, and maybe even to be able to make a little bit of a living off it. So here I am. And after going through all the notes and I overhauled this whole thing, and then I got a note from the second editor telling me she’s leaving the publisher. So now I don’t even have an editor and I’ve got this manuscript. Sometimes if your editor goes, the publishing house will say, by the way, all your books are gone too. When this happened they told me I was staying. So my book is still there but I have no editor. And I just finished the novel and poor me, I know. No editor. And it was the president of Random House who called to say she was still expecting the novel.

FWJ: Such problems!

AC: Yes, right. Such problems to have in my life. So she took it and went off on vacation and I was waiting to hear for some time what’s going to be the verdict. But she did come back and place it with a new editor. And who knows? This editor might want me to overhaul it again in a whole new direction.

FWJ Does it have a title yet?

AC: The Last Goddess Standing. You know, the title is the thing that I started out with years ago and it’s the one part of it that hasn’t changed, even when I’ve wanted to change it. Now it’s become symbolic of what’s happening with the book so I’m really stuck with it.

FWJ: You mentioned poetry earlier. It’s rare to find someone who is accepted in the literary world as both a poet and a fiction writer. Someone like Ray Carver is really thought of as a fiction writer but his poetry is sort of tolerated. On the other side you’ve got people like Mark Strand who has been the poet laureate, but he’s got some fiction out there which hasn’t gotten much attention. You’re different in the sense that you’re accomplished in both genres.

AC: I’m happy you say that because I don’t think I’m accepted in both genres by the American academy. In my experience when I’ve been at poetry festivals and there is one of those guys there, they don’t even speak to me. And I think with the success of my books, So Far From God in particular where I was thrown into the view of the mainstream, readers discovered me in that milieu and hadn’t heard of any of my other work. I had been working on poetry at that point for eight years without doing anything else, not teaching or trying to make a living. I just wrote poetry, telling myself, if I’m going to make a living on it, this is all I can do. I had some success with my collection My Father was Toltec so when So Far From God came out I was very really surprised when people came up to me and asked if I’ve written poetry. I found that the poetry fell to the sidelines. It already is for a lot of people just a side genre unfortunately, so the fiction writing was so much more highlighted of what I do.

FWJ: Sure. Because you’ve published quite a bit of nonfiction too.

AC: And articles. And I have my one official play that I wrote. Two versions of the play I wrote.

FWJ: Two versions?

AC: It’s called “Psst . . . I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor.” And it was based on the story of a torture survivor which I had originally written as a poem in one of my books. When I was still living in Chicago, a director from the Goodman Theater approached me about dramatizing the story which had all the elements of a play, the actual story, without changing anything about it. And then I decided to turn it into an actual drama piece and it had a wonderful premier there.

FWJ: You did the actual adaptation?

AC: I studied a bunch of plays over the summer and then knocked it out.

FWJ: Can I ask what the plays were that you studied?

AC: I reread a bunch of plays that I had read before. I can’t even tell you the names because I might be making it up. I could say Beckett or somebody, but you know I had a bunch of plays on my bookshelf. But the most influential thing that happened to me that summer was that I was invited to speak in Germany where I received my PhD, some alumni had discovered me and they had a conference, and a good friend of mine in Germany had turned into a theater agent by coincidence. A fluke. She’d been teaching but then became this agent looking at plays in English and German. We traveled together to Amsterdam and she had all these plays she had to be reading. I was with her and I started reading them too, all these European plays that may or may not have ever been produced and I got to study all these contemporary styles. There was one that really impressed me. It was done with two characters in tandem and unfortunately I don’t even remember who the author was. My intention was to read the stars, you know, read Shakespeare or Garcia Lorca, but it was these I ended up reading that summer traveling around with her and when I got back I knocked out my play just like that.

FWJ: That’s really serendipitous.

AC: Yes. And we were talking about sense of place before and that goes back to this idea. Who would have known that my little trip to Germany and Amsterdam with my friend with her little satchel of plays would be so important? So I did the play and it was very successful and it’s been produced at various Universities and it had a wonderful premier at the Goodman. It was well reviewed and I was very happy. It’s been done at the University of Chicago and at Cornell. I’m not pushing it any more because I don’t want people to think, “Again, that play?” I have to write another play.

FWJ: Do you go see it when it’s produced? What’s that like?

AC: When they’ve invited me. I have a very interesting relationship with my writing and my editors or people like the director. I’ve been told I’m different this way from other writers. I don’t get attached to it in the sense that I don’t get emotional about it. Once the work is there, the work is there. Once it’s in a director’s hands it’s the director’s vision. When it premiered at the Goodman I had the not very brilliant idea about inviting the person on whom the work is based. The torture survivor—who also published her memoirs and so forth. And it was packed the first night, so many people, 400 seats, and I was sitting with her. I had been asked by the director to add a little levity somewhere in the beginning because it gets very intense, very dark. And so I did—new material. So we were watching it and here’s this new material and it flows and she’s just like, “Mmmm, okay, great.” And then the grimness comes in and she just fell apart in my hands. And when she fell apart I fell apart. A just started crying and we were weeping and she was clutching me and so the first night I never even got to see the play because we were both weeping so badly. She basically had a meltdown and I had a meltdown because she had a meltdown. I never got to see it, I didn’t even open my eyes. So the next night I went with some other people in the audience and I finally got to hear it. It was very nice to hear it because now I was so detached from [the narrative] that it was like going to see someone else’s writing. Hearing someone else saying words that you’ve written is a very nice experience.

FWJ: Were you able to be taken by surprise at all by what was on stage.

AC: Oh yes. I was very impressed with myself. You know when you’re reading your own work and I’m up on stage I often think, how the hell did the editors let me get away with this crap? And I’m not the only one who thinks like this. I’ve talked to other writers who say—especially if they’re on a book tour—they think how in the world did they let me publish this? I wish I could go over it one more time. So this was new to me to hear an actor doing it and it was great.

FWJ: What’s your favorite? Fiction, nonfiction, playwriting?

AC: I can tell you what I don’t like, and that’s what I’m doing now. Nonfiction. I just finished the novel and I have a book contract with the Feminist Press for personal essays, and when I turned in that novel last summer, I had to dance around that idea of writing personal essays for a month. Because I know what that’s going to take out of me once I start working, the reflection, going back into that place emotionally. The other is the style, the transitional phrase, why am I writing this, why do you want to read this? All of those things come into question when we’re talking about writing personal essays or critical essays. You got to make the personal connection with the universe in a very linear, thought out, conscious way. No forgiveness there that you can get in So Far From God, that you can get in a poem. Readers don’t forgive you when they’re reading essays. Why am I here? If I’m not connected, I’m not interested.

FWJ: So is it easier to be honest in fiction?

AC: Yes! Fiction is total joy for a writer. It’s your world. And you only have to hold that reader in the suspension of disbelief. As long as you don’t break them out of it, if they get on board in the first few pages or in the first chapter, they’re on board with you. You can create any kind of world for them and as long as they’re a good reader, meaning as long as they don’t say, you can’t walk from Albuquerque to Chimayo in a day. I’ve had those nasty Amazon reviewers who say, She doesn’t know anything about New Mexico. It’s fiction. That’s why it’s not an essay. But when you do nonfiction you have to the qualifications. You gotta prove it. All that has to come together or your reader is gone.

FWJ: Where does poetry fit into that spectrum?

AC: My props go to the poet who really makes a commitment to poetry and isn’t writing little stories with broken lines, little anecdotes with broken lines. I think modern poetry has fallen into that camp ans is just a lot of that. But if they’re actually looking at language, at the craft, which takes a combination of elements of what poetry should be, even if it doesn’t end up being in meter, then my hat goes off to her or to him. It takes an incredible amount of discipline to sit down and work on that. It could take ten years to do a book. Easily. It’s much more of a blessing from the Gods to be able to do poetry and I would like to do one more collection before I’m gone, but I know that it’s a time I have to set aside to do that.

FWJ: You write your poetry in big batches then, instead of a poem here or a poem there until you’ve accumulated a book?

AC: What happened with the last collection is my play went into production and I must have gone into some state of denial. You know, I can’t be having a play produced in downtown Chicago having never written one before.... I was teaching at the time and off for the summer so I was also supposed to be working on a new novel. I was having a very hard time with the editor I had. She hated everything I showed her. I went home looking for something else and I had one poem that I had written in the past years and it was a very dark poem, written in a night of despair. And when I reread it I saw that it was very sad, very suicidal. It was 27 pages long and I decided to sit down and start cleaning it up. And then sort of cheering it up too. And as I cheered it up the story grew longer and longer, and there were more stories to tell, all in three line stanzas. And before I knew it, six weeks went by and I had three hundred pages. It was several stories about—who knows who the narrator is when you write a poem, but it was about this original narrator. Then I was going into Greek mythology and Aztec mythology and I was telling about the history of Mexicans and I was picking up on all this stuff I might have put in a novel, but instead I was escaping. I had these 300 pages and I thought, I really am going to have stop. I mean, I always wanted to write an epic but maybe this wasn’t the time. So I finished it and turned it in to that editor who never liked anything I wrote and she said it was very nice, but where was her novel. And I said, “This is a novel. It’s a novel in verse.” So I turned it over to a small press, God bless them. They published a lot of poetry, a lot of poetry from other countries. This was Curbstone. They just folded up and sold everything to Northwestern. But they published my novel in verse and it was called, Water Color Women, Opaque Men, and it won the Best of the Independent Publishers award in 2005. It was like I got it out in one summer. But now I have to go back and write a novel.

FWJ: So you stay in one mode as you work?

AC: Everybody’s different ,but normally if I’m in prose mode I don’t go back and write a poem at night or something like that. I would really like to go back and do a play or two as part of the oeuvre, and I’ve been thinking about the second play. I don’t normally think about it because I don’t live in a theater atmosphere. So I’m going to have to just sit down and say, okay I’m going to write a play now. It’s going to be one summer or one winter, and I’ll say now I’m going to write my play.

FWJ: Are you strict about your work habits?

AC: When I was young I thought of myself as a nocturnal person and I used to write at night. My first novels and most of my short stories I would get inspired by the silence of the night when everyone else was asleep and that whole thing. You have your busy day behind you. I have a son who’s an adult now, but being a single mom and raising him on my own, I had to start working around his schedule. Also I taught and had to earn a living, so I had to learn to write whenever I could write. At this point I’m not teaching but my writing schedule is pretty much something in my twenties I never thought would be the case, which is that I get up, make my coffee, and I go to my computer. And I pretty much can knock out a six hour day right now. With The Guardians, the last time I published, I was doing 12 hours. Nothing else. You don’t even want to stop to eat. You just go get something from the kitchen and then bring it back and you eat it. Now I’ve had a lot of life distractions so my focus doesn’t stay as long as I would like. I would like to rebuild that again.

FWJ: Do you get anxious if you aren’t writing as much as you think you should?

AC: No, because I’m a very hard working person, a disciplined person. I know once my days aren’t broken up so much that I can make myself go back to it.

FWJ: How do you see yourself then, as a fiction writer who also writes poems? A novelist or a short story writer? Are you an essayist who writes plays? If you were to have business cards printed up, what would they say? Ana Castillo....

AC: Writer.

Rebecca Makkai and I sat down together to talk about writing, the writing life, and what it’s like to have four Best Americans. A Chicago-area native, she met with me at one of the north suburban cafes she regularly writes in one warm October afternoon. I started by asking about her incredible string of Best American short stories that began in 2008.

Fifth Wednesday Journal: I have to ask you about the four Best Americans in a row. The fifth year, when you weren’t in the book, was that a bummer?

Rebecca Makkai: It was, yes. I probably shouldn’t say that. It was a very, very minor bummer. I was so ridiculously grateful to have that first story chosen. I consider that one of the best days of my entire life. And then it happened three more times. I found myself disappointed that fifth year, but of course I was laughing at myself the whole time. Like, You poor little thing. I did have a story nominated that year. It wasn’t my strongest ever, and there was another story, I think by Jennifer Haigh, with a very similar plot: a funeral for a professor, told by a woman he had an affair with. It helped because, you know, you can’t put them both in the book, and hers was a better story.

FWJ: Anyone else ever get four in a row?

RM: Someone told me that since they moved to guest editors the record is four, but it’s like a multi-way tie, and might be broken now. Before that, the record was Irwin Shaw, seven in a row. Now the guest editors bring their own aesthetics to bear each year, so there’s some welcome diversity in the selection. The year Michael Chabon edited is a fascinating collection — he was reading out on his own a little bit, stuff that wasn’t nominated, finding things that had been published online. Junot Diaz is editing this year, apparently, and I can’t wait to see what he chooses.

FWJ: Do you keep up with them?

RM: I do! I used to read them cover to cover, but in the last couple of years I have less control over my own reading time because this weird thing happens once your career gets going, where you start reading things you’re supposed to blurb, reading books by friends because you feel you really ought to, or I’m going to be in conversation with someone in a bookstore so I need to read that, or I’m reviewing a book.

MAKKAI TAKES THE FIFTH

REBECCA MAKKAI is the Chicago-based author of the story collection Music for Wartime, and the novels The Hundred-Year House (a BookPage “Best Book” of 2014 and winner of the Chicago Writers Association Award) and The Borrower (a Booklist Top Ten Debut). Her short fiction was featured in The Best American Short Stories anthology in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 and appears regularly in publications such as Harper’s, Tin House, and Ploughshares, and on public radio’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. The recipient of a 2014 NEA Fellowship, Rebecca teaches at Northwestern University, Lake Forest College, and StoryStudio Chicago; in the fall of 2015, she will be visiting faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her website is www.rebeccamakkai.com.

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FWJ: And as a writing teacher, I bet a fair amount of student writing, too.

RM: Right. And if I just spent the last three hours reading student manuscripts, it’s really hard to crawl into bed with a book. I’m going to do a crossword puzzle instead at that point. I’ve actually kept a list of every book I’ve read since 2001, and so much of what I read now never makes it in there because it’s not technically a book.

FWJ: What were the books you read that made you want to write? RM: I started writing stories when I was four. There was not some moment when I decided to be a writer, I was just born this way. I think for that reason, everything I read along the way counted as stylistic influences. I’d try to soak everything up. I was the kid everyone was sick of in English class with my hand always up in the air. I’m certainly a product of everyone I’ve ever read, but I’m not the sort of writer who read someone early on and said I want to be like this person or I’m going to incorporate this. The mind-blowing moments for me that changed the way I write would be Nabokov or Stoppard, but I don’t think I particularly write like those writers.

FWJ: Nabokov I definitely can see, the structural gamesmanship. Maybe a little Marquez in there too — I thought about him while reading The Hundred Year House.

RM: Which Marquez?

FWJ: One Hundred Years of Solitude because you come away from both books with a feeling of timelessness, a sense everything is really all happening at once.

RM: I do love that book!

FWJ: I just realized the similarities of the titles. Was that a deliberate nod to Marquez?

RM: It wasn’t intended as a nod, but when I realized it was there I thought, oh, that fits. Absolutely. That book was an influence. Jaw dropping for me as a reader: The kind of moment that maybe comes out fifteen years later in really subconscious ways. I haven’t gone back and reread it, and I remember very little about it, but the feeling of it has stayed with me.

FWJ: The Hundred Year House moves backwards as it’s moving forward — a neat trick which you pull off seamlessly. You didn’t write it backwards, did you?

RM: No. I wrote it in the order you read it. I wrote the 1999 section, then 1955, then 1929, so in order to do that — at the point where I

realized I had to do that — I stopped where I was and spent about a year outlining and it. I ended up with a hundred-page outline. It was ridiculous. I had to have it all worked out ahead of time, the cause and effect of little things. I had to know everything that happened in 1929 before I wrote 1955. Not my typical process.

FWJ: Do you hear from readers that they go back and check earlier parts against the later stuff?

RM: Yeah, that’s why no one should read it on a Kindle. It’s terrible on an e-reader because it’s meant to be the kind of book where you can flip back and reread and check that someone’s name is the same.

FWJ: During the 1955 section I went back and reread the New Year’s Eve 1999 conversation.

RM: And that’s essential! You have to be able to flip back to that conversation to understand what happened in 1955. It’s meant to be read that way. I’ve visited a few book clubs and there’s always someone who says I didn’t understand this part or that part and then you find out they read it on an e-reader. We’ve known for a long time that people don’t retain information as well when they read electronically, but specifically they’re just realizing that people don’t retain chronology. They’ve done these studies where they ask people to read a book, some of them on paper, some on screen, and they quiz them on trivia from the book and they all do equally well. But then they give them five events and ask them to put them in order. People who read electronically can’t do it.

FWJ: That makes sense to me. It must be that people are using the actual pages as reference points.

RM: That’s exactly it. I’m two pages from the end, or I’m halfway through. It’s subconscious, but you just don’t have that with an e-reader. I’ve never used an e-reader, but I have listened to books on audio, and I know it’s the same effect. It’s much harder to recall the structure of a book. If you’re just completely going for entertainment — I’ll try to go for lighter books on audio — then whatever, it’s fine. But I worry sometimes about my writing students. You’re not going to understand structure by reading that way.

FWJ: You published essays in Harper’s that were part fiction, part memoir. You’ve written that the details were invented but the stories were handed down to you from your family. How is writing this kind of hybrid essay different from writing a straight

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memoir — or a straight fiction?

RM: I am planning to do a nonfiction book eventually about my father’s family in Hungary in the 30s, which is what those stories are about. Memoir is really the wrong word for it because it’s not anything I personally remember. It’s not my life. But at the same time I think it’ll be personal in that it’ll be about my experience in trying to investigate the stuff — trying to read some of the novels my grandmother wrote that I haven’t been able to read because they’re in Hungarian — but it’ll also be largely about the past. My father just moved back to Hungary this spring after 59 years in America. I’m hopefully going to visit him in April. And I might be able to get around a little bit and do some digging. I especially want to interview him some more. His parents were both very political and alternately on both the right and wrong sides of history. So there is a lot of confusing stuff leading up to the war. Somehow by the time I was born, my grandfather who had been a member of the Hungarian parliament was living in Hawaii as a yoga instructor. So there are some blanks to fill in. My grandmother after the war was writing novels still, but they were highly censored by the communist government. She was writing historical fiction in order to be political. I’m fascinated by all of that. It’s not just WW II, it’s kind of the whole trajectory.

FWJ: It seems like a lot of that back story already informs your writing, and I’m thinking of the story “Suspension: April 20, 1984.” RM: Exactly. The piece that appeared in Harper’s was three of those family legends put together. In the collection they’re separated, and then there’s a fourth piece about my family that’s quite different, “Suspension.” What they’re doing in the collection is hopefully shedding some sort of meta-fictional light on the other stories. Then the question is, how does what I write grapple with this strange legacy? The last story in the collection is called “The Museum of the Dearly Departed,” and there’s an elderly Hungarian couple who are absolutely not my grandparents — their history is different — but I’m clearly inviting you to read them as an analog in some way for my grandparents. It means something different in the context of that collection and in the context of my family’s stories, different from what it meant on its own in the Iowa Review, where it was first published.

FWJ: Your writing has a theme of community in general, but very often artistic communities specifically. How does being part of an artistic community animate or inspire your writing?

RM: I do spend a fair amount of time at artists’ residencies (Yaddo,

Ucross, Ragdale), and they absolutely feed my work. Not that I’m literally inspired — literally hearing someone’s work and thinking, I have to incorporate that, or seeing someone’s art and going, Oh it’s all about the color pink for me now. It’s more like what John Cheever said about Yaddo: “It’s a monastery by day and cruise ship by night.” That’s apt. You get sixteen-hour workdays with a walk and some yoga thrown in, and then you have enlivening conversation in the evening. Back in Cheever’s day there were more drunken hijinks than now, but still people are sitting around the fireplace with a bottle of wine and having — not a serious conversation about art necessarily, but telling stories. Joking around. The people who go are incredibly creative, intelligent people, and if I didn’t have that discourse I would not do as well working in isolation. I was at an artists’ colony once, and one person decided he really needed concentration, so he wasn’t even going to come to dinner. He was just going to eat in his room. He lasted a week before having a meltdown. There’s also something really great about those places just in knowing that everyone is all around you in their own rooms doing work. You get to those places, and the very first day you haven’t met anyone yet. So you’re in your room working, and it feels weird and totally isolated. Then you meet everyone at dinner, and you see them grabbing breakfast in the morning. Then you go back to your studio, and you feel like you’re part of a beehive. You feel energy all around you. It isn’t lonely at all. You know everyone’s working their asses off in their studios. You’re going to get together at dinner, and someone’s going to say, How was your day, and you’re going to be able to say It was pretty good, I wrote 2000 words or It was terrible and I stared at the wall all day and I’m so frustrated and I’m questioning this whole project, but you’re in this very small way accountable to other people, and there’s this group energy. It really is like a beehive.

FWJ: Are there some types of artists you prefer to be around more than others? In The Hundred Year House there seemed to an emphasis on visual artists.

RM: I’ve stayed with artists and photographers, but I think their inclusion had more to do with the book’s themes. Photography, in specific, captures a moment in time — which is thematically relevant when your book goes backwards. Writers are the ones who are going to tell crazy stories, but at the same time I know a lot already about the writing world, so to me it’s fascinating to talk to a visual artist about how he makes money, to learn about this completely different way of making art. The first time I heard a painter say she had to go back to her studio and revise, I was

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completely thrown. Of course I knew artists touched up their paintings, but that word “revision” seemed really startling. But it makes total sense. She was rethinking the concept of the painting.

FWJ: How do you keep the momentum once you leave a colony? RM: I haven’t had a good writing day since, like, February. But what’s great about the colonies for me is that I get going full speed, and then when I get home it’s easier to keep going.

FWJ: Is that kind of an experience more useful when plotting out a novel, or later, when revising?

RM: I’ve done both. My least productive residency was one where I thought I was going to start a novel and I really never started it there. I just wrote a short story and revised some old stuff. I need to show up with a project started and then go from there. When I come back I have a lot of things buzzing around. I can work for two hours and get a lot done. It’s harder to jump back into something when you only have two hours to work on a Thursday. If I was already going full speed I could jump in and do it. Right now I’m in a place where I haven’t worked on this project for a number of reasons, part of which is that I had two books to promote and summer vacation with the kids at home. I really haven’t worked full time since February or March, and to dive back into my current novel, I need to reread everything I wrote, find all my outlines, reconcile two different computer files that have different revisions in them. And it’s like, if I have two hours the idea of doing all that is overwhelming. Whereas I’m doing a residency the first three weeks of November, and the first day I get there it will be organizational, and rereading. . . .

FWJ: Which ones do you prefer?

RM: Ragdale, north of Chicago, is actually my favorite. There’s incredible history there, and wonderful energy. While it’s not as old a residency, the house itself dates back to the 1890s. The guy who lived there was the architect who built it, and one of his daughters was the sculptor Sylvia Shaw Judson who did that bird girl statue that people know from the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The place does feel haunted in this lovely way. And the food is great.

FWJ: That seems pretty important.

RM: It is! I’m mostly vegetarian, and if you get into a place where the only vegetarian option is steamed broccoli you’re going to be really sad really fast.

FWJ: What about the broader artistic community? I know you’re from around here, but do you consider yourself a Chicago writer? RM: I very much consider myself from and of Chicago. I feel so supported by the Chicago press and the literary scene and, oh my God, the bookstores? We’re so spoiled for independent bookstores in the city. It’s ridiculous. I love to write about Chicago. The Hundred Year House was set in the suburbs, and the novel I’m working on now is set largely in the city, in Boystown. The city itself inspires me. But that said, I’m not looking at, like, a historical tradition of Chicago Writing. I’ve never read Nelson Algren. I probably should. I’ve read shockingly little Saul Bellow. I’m not sure I’ve been influenced by any tradition of Chicago writing. And also I think that when people say, “the tradition of Chicago writing,” the canon of whatever, it’s white men. They’re not usually talking about Gwendolyn Brooks. And I think what’s going on in Chicago, especially right now, is diverse in many ways, and it has little to do with that white, male, hard-knuckled, Carl Sandburg tradition. I’m influenced by what’s happening here right now, not fifty or a hundred years ago. I keep trying to convince other writers to move to Chicago. We’ve got so much going on without it being all about sucking up to agents or editors at a party, like it might be some places. People are open and supportive and welcoming.

FWJ: Are there a lot of agents living here? RM: No. That’s the point.

FWJ: If you lived in New York you’d be bumping into your agent all the time.

RM: I wouldn’t mind that at all, she’s lovely. But if you don’t have an agent yet and you go to a party and there’s an agent in the corner and you have to try and angle yourself to have a conversation, or Hey can you introduce me to this person . . . That’s a lot of stress, and it’s usually fruitless. There’s something nice in Chicago about the industry not being here. We have some great small presses, but the pressure is off, because the pressure is elsewhere. We’re on this island, and we can hang out with each other. We don’t have to worry about that stuff, at least not tonight, not at this party, you know?

FWJ: Do you write in public? In cafes like this?

RM: Yes. I actually write here a lot. I don’t get as much done with the distractions of home. I have kids. My ideal situation would be writing in a cafe with no WiFi, but in a foreign country so everyone is speaking a language I can’t understand.

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FWJ: Are you listening to music when you write?

RM: No. You’re supposed to be using the music part of your brain tuned in to what you are writing. If the music part of your brain is occupied with someone else’s music. . . . I know some people that works for, and they claim that rhythm comes in to their writing, but then I feel like you’re not listening to the rhythm and sound structure of your words.

FWJ: Then do you read your stuff out loud, to hear it?

RM: I used to. I’ve trained myself to read silently but editorially, if that makes sense. I’m reading and editing for sound even though my mouth is not moving. I acted a lot in high school and college, and that was essential for me in learning how to write dialogue. Also scene structure and story structure and all kinds of things. I think it affects the way I read, too. You’re constantly thinking about inflection and delivery. If you’ve had that experience it’s much harder to write a really bad line of dialogue that no human could ever say naturally.

FWJ: Were there specific plays or playwrights who inspired you as an actor?

RM: I’m in awe of Tom Stoppard, who I think is one of the greatest living writers in any genre. The things I tended to be in were a lot of musicals or, in college, weird little one-act plays written by students. I remember at one point I was in some one-act where I was supposed to be buried in the desert. I was standing under the stage with my head sticking out and someone put a box over my head and someone else swung an axe at the box and I had to climb down this ladder really fast before the axe hit my head. Not exactly Actor’s Equity working conditions. It was meant to be tremendously symbolic, I think, though I’m not sure what it symbolized other than my eminent demise.

FWJ: What’s the ideal writing schedule for you?

RM: This is pure fantasy, you have to understand. A great day of writing would be drop my kids off at school, walk to the coffee shop to get some exercise, walk back, get in my car, go to the library, and sit there and write for three hours. Go get lunch. Maybe do something different with my afternoon. You can’t write all day every day. I have a bazillion emails to answer. Maybe go into the city and have lunch with a friend, then do some research. Then write again at night. This is pure fantasy — this day has never happened.

FWJ: Do you prefer first drafts or revisions?

RM: I love both of them, actually. I really do. The most painful phase is the heavy revision phase where you’re trying to restructure something and it hurts your brain. You’re like, If I move this here then it won’t make sense, I’ll have to take this character out or lose this section.

FWJ: This happens after a complete draft?

RM: Yes, but it’s not polishing yet, still heavy restructuring. It’s like if you ever help a kid do Legos, and they come to you and there’s this piece that doesn’t fit, and you realize it’s because they made a mistake seven steps back? Then you have to insert this piece somehow, and move something else, and do it without tearing down the whole wall. . . . That’s the phase of revision that’s the most painful. Even though it can also be rewarding. The polishing phase at the end for language or whatever, and the early kind of I-can-go-anywhere drafting, those are both joyful for me.

FWJ: How do you generally start? With a setting or characters? RM: Situation first. Plot. All my notes that are potential stories are about situations. I have a note right now that’s like: a funeral that was supposed to be a wedding. The father of the bride died, the venue was booked, so they decided to turn it into a memorial service. And they’re going to elope. And the story would start with people at this funeral which used to be a wedding. I have no idea who my characters would be, I don’t know if it’ll be family or just random guests, I don’t know what the voice would be what the tone would be, I don’t know if it’ll be funny or sad, I don’t know where this would be, I just know the situation. Then when I go in and start writing the first couple of sentences, that’s when I’m feeling stuff out. I find it pretty fast, usually — tense and point of view and who my characters are — and it grows from there. Location may be a part of that, too. But I’m not someone who starts with voice or character. I know people who do, but I have no idea how that works.

FWJ: How do you know when you’re done?

RM: Sometimes I stop working, and I know it’s not done because it doesn’t work. But sometimes I get to a phase I call the picking-at- scabs phase. I’m just messing with stuff to mess with it. Like changing the word purse to the word handbag. I mean, that’s not going to make that much of a difference, and I’ll think, what am I doing?

FWJ: How often do you start a piece of writing but abandon it before finishing?

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RM: Depends on what you mean by start. In my notebook I’ll have like five sentences of a story — and by notebook I mean file on my computer, actually. But ones that I’ve written halfway through and then stopped? I can only think of four or five stories ever that I haven’t finished and published. But it’s not like everything I touch turns to gold. It’s just I feel like every story is a solvable problem. And if I start it, I can absolutely finish it. Maybe I was going about it wrong, and I need to completely redo it. I have this story that I wrote about a year and a half ago. It just didn’t work, but I knew I was missing something so I let it sit there, and then like a year later I realized what I needed to change was the setting and who the people were but keep the core of it the same. I’m going to go back and do that. I feel like I unlocked that one.

FWJ: So even when you’re not actively working on a story you’re thinking about it occasionally, back burner stuff.

RM: Right. I was in an art museum in Minneapolis and I was reading a plaque about this weird performance art installation in the 60s and I was like, oh my God, I need to move that entire story I wrote into the 60s and put it at a performance art installation. And it’s not like I’m doggedly determined not to give up on any of my stories. I just get attached to them. I want them to work. Even the ones I abandoned years and years ago, there is still this thought that I might very well revisit and rewrite them.

FWJ: When you’re starting are you already aware of whether you’re working on a novel or a short story?

RM: There are certain plots, certain situations, where there’s just no way you can do it in a short story, or certain things you couldn’t sustain for three hundred pages. The Hundred Year House started as a short story and didn’t work. That was one I put aside for years and kept coming back to. I wanted to save that one — which I ended up turning into a three-hundred-page novel. The last story in Music For Wartime, “The Museum of Dearly Departed,” which I mentioned earlier, I had originally envisioned as a novel. It’s about an apartment building with a gas leak where basically everyone has died and relatives are coming in to clean out their apartments. I originally imagined it as everyone’s story and everyone’s apartment. Which would really be a novel.

FWJ: A novel made up of short stories?

RM: Well, no. Truly a novel, all wound together. The reason I turned it into a short story was because I felt like it was the missing piece for this short story collection. I needed something to wrap it

all up, and I felt like this idea of someone dealing with aftermath was something I wanted to end my collection — so I took that idea and made it into a short story instead.

FWJ: Has not having to worry about being published changed your writing?

RM: Well, I still worry about it — but I know what you mean. I think it’s made me more accountable in terms of things like research. Which is good. I feel like I was sloppy with my first novel, The Borrower. This was only in the hardcover, but someone had this shoebox, a Hush Puppy shoebox. I said it was beagle on the box, but it’s actually a basset hound. And somehow my copy editors didn’t catch it, and I’ve gotten like fifteen e-mails about it since then. And it was fixed by the paperback, so this is people who find the first edition of the hard cover in the library, and they’re like I hate to tell you but. . . . And they get really worked up about it. They’re like, This really bothers me but I know it shouldn’t. . . . When you’re working on your first book and publication is a distant dream, it’s so easy to gloss over that stuff, which is what I did. I had this inchoate idea of what it meant to be read and have a readership, a vague picture of having a book signing somewhere and maybe being read in an English class. No sense of the publishing industry, how books are made, the promotion, the professional stuff that goes along with it. The novel I’m working on now is partly about the AIDS epidemic. That’s a lot of research. I have to be incredibly accurate and careful to honor these stories which are not mine to tell. It’s already an egregious thing to go in as someone who was a kid in the 80s and try to tell the story. But having a likely publisher — if the book is good enough — keeps me honest about that sort of thing. I can’t just make something up and be like, That’s fine, no one will notice. I know what it’s like to have my work out there in the public.

FWJ: So is the life you’re leading close to what you imagined? RM: Oh, no. Not at all. It’s lovely, it’s awesome. But I really didn’t understand the professional responsibilities, the in-box full of emails you have to handle. I’m not talking about from readers. You do get some of that, and it’s lovely, but I mean like, you’re doing some event somewhere and someone needs you to send a current bio and an author photo. Then they write back that your author photo isn’t high resolution enough. Then you have to write and cc your publicist asking for the high-res photo, and then your publicist writes back, and you have to thank her, and then the first person e-mails you back to make sure you have the right link to tweet this out on social media so that you can get people there, and

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there’s fifteen different e-mails about travel arrangements, and the hotel and the driver who’s going to pick you up at the airport. I’m not complaining for an instant, because it’s all awesome, but now it’s taken me like five hours of extra stuff for this reading that’s going to last one hour. And when it’s a year of heavy book promotion — which this one has been — that adds up fast.

FWJ: Do you like doing readings?

RM: I do. I love them. I don’t get nervous as long as I’m guaranteed there will be a decent-sized crowd. I live in fear of the reading where two people show up.

FWJ: Have you had those?

RM: Yes. Not two, but I’ve had one with three. Several with five. It’s so awkward for everyone involved, and you have no control over it. It’s usually not your fault. I have a great time at readings — I did a lot of theater, and I’m not going to do funny voices or anything, but I’m going to give a good reading.

FWJ: Plus there’s humor in your stories, and that helps.

RM: Yes. And there’s going to be wine there, and we’re going to go out afterwards or I’m going to do a Q&A and try to make you laugh. But there are plenty of writers for whom this is torture. If someone goes to a reading where the author is really quiet and clearly in pain, I can see why you wouldn’t want to come out to another. It’s honestly not what people sign up for when they become writers.

FWJ: Maybe the poets. They get all that audience patter between poems.

RM: Right. Some fiction writers really just want to sit alone at their desks.

FWJ: Do you pay attention to reviews?

RM: I do read them, and I don’t know why, because it’s rare that I see anything helpful. It’s all just a horrible ego roller coaster. Plus you want to know what people are saying about you. But people who say they read them to learn more about their own writing — I don’t know if that works. I think I’ve probably learned one thing that I didn’t already know about my own writing from reading reviews. And it was a helpful criticism that more than one person made, and so I was like, OK. Point taken.

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RM: No. You’re not supposed to. It would be very, very bad form. There was one that was so inaccurate and very public and had so many errors in it, like calling my main character by the wrong name, and then making a big deal out of her name which wasn’t even her name. Taking a line of dialogue from one page and then a line from another page and smashing them together as if it were a conversation, and then saying, Look what a cheesy conversation. It’s like, yeah, that would have been cheesy if that’s what I had written. But I didn’t. This is the only one I contacted my agent about and asked if we at least get them to put a retraction on the actual factual errors, and she said no. Which was good. You just don’t want to draw attention to it, you don’t want to look bitter, and it really bothers you for a day or two and then it doesn’t bother you any more.

FWJ: I like to ask everyone at the end what we should be reading that we haven’t already heard about?

RM: Underrated writers working right now? Juliet Otsuka. She was shortlisted for the National Book Award for one of her novels, and she publishes brilliant short stories as well. She’s stylistically innovative and poetic, and I love assigning her stories in class to writers because they often come out of it saying I’ve never read anything like this. It’s not hard to read or weird but often incantatory, not necessarily narrative. Absolutely brilliant, lyrical, startling prose. I’m waiting for her to win some huge award and for everyone to pretend they knew about her all along.

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Daniel Libman is a Pushcart Prize and Paris Review Discovery Prize winner. His debut story collection, Married But Looking, was published by Livingston Press in 2012. He regularly writes the “Taking the Fifth” interview and is a founding editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal.

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5Wed: The phrase “linked stories” is almost meaningless because it’s used so much to market collections, but yours is the real deal: stories that connect, comment and greatly enrich each other when read together.

SMD: I definitely did think of it as a conceptual whole, trying to tell the story of a community. That was my goal although I didn’t know that when I started out. I was just writing one story, “Abu Suffyan.” The original version was much shorter and I got it published in an Arab American magazine called Mizma. Even several months later I kept coming back to it and I thought: my character is very unusual. He’s a man who’s a wise and reflective person in a tumultuous time. He’s like the voice of reason. I kept thinking, what made him that way? Characters are like people in that their experiences help create their future personalities. I wondered what made him so wise and rational. Later I wrote what became the first story in the book, “The Journey Home.” That was a difficult story to write because it was loosely based on my grandfather’s experience.

5Wed: It’s a family story?

SMD: Loosely. He was born in 1885 so he was young man in the beginning of WWI. The Ottomans had begun to conscript people, Lebanese and Palestinians, to the front lines and he was forcibly drafted to the war and he did run away from the Turkish army. He never really talked about it, but the story goes he was taken one day and a year later he showed up again. He walked from Damascus to my family’s village which is just outside of Jerusalem.

5Wed: In the place where most of the stories in A Curious Land are set?

SMD: Yes. So that is a true story and what happened to him during that time, how he escaped, he never really talked about. Probably some PTSD there.

5wed: There was a different kind of a code on what men said about war.

SMD: Exactly. And what you would admit. But I know later events; for example, in the 1948 war and in 1967 he had his doors open to the refugees who came through my family’s village. He was very keen on helping people. His house was always open to anyone who needed a place to stay or to hide. For me as a fiction writer I put that all together and kind of imagined what happened to him at that time, that he was found by a group of Bedouins. I know from my historical research Bedouins were affected very much by World Wars I and II. So I just put all those elements together. I found out from research this was an actual policy during the Ottoman Empire to conscript Palestinian and Lebanese during those last days of the war when the Ottomans knew they were losing. So yes, a lot of family stories are braided into this book, and a lot of historical research is also weaved in. I’m trying to create a sense of place and time, which is difficult because the place stays the same but I’m moving throughout an entire century.

5Wed: When did you write that story and when did you decide it would be the lead piece in the collection?

SMD: “The Journey Home” was the second story I wrote and it wasn’t until later when I thought about how to order them. Originally I was going to put it second. In other words, in “Abu Sufayan” you learn he has this past and then in the second story you would find out what it is. But my reader is a Western reader. I was throwing a lot of unfamiliar names and terms and cultural facts at the reader. I thought I should give a timeline that was familiar, a chronological timeline.

5Wed: So the stories are in chronological order as a guideline for the reader?

SMD: That’s the challenge for linked short stories. The reader has to put things together and is a very active part of the process. As a writer you have to create links for readers to hold on to.

5Wed: The stories contain some italicized Arab words and terms. Some I eventually figured out from context, like servees, but others I never did, although the words worked on the level atmosphere and authenticity. Is it difficult to know when to go with an Arab word versus when to translate? Is the process deliberate or mostly intuitive?

SMD: It’s really tough! I know 20 or 25 years ago people who were using foreign words in their writing were really working hard to make sure the readers got it. Some writers put glossaries in the back.

5Wed: I have to admit I did flip back once to see if there was a glossary.

SMD: Did you? Well, a lot of people include them and other writers will work very hard to define what the word means in context. I think lately we see—especially with Latin American writers—people are just dropping the words and telling the reader: here, figure it out. Junot Diaz does that quite a bit. His narrators drop in Spanglish words. The narrators aren’t helping but Junot Diaz the author is behind the scenes offering some contextual clues. I tried to do it the same way, use some of the words for atmosphere as you say, but not make it too artificial, not make the attempt at helping the reader too obvious. The more difficult part is translating what people said from Arabic to English so a lot of the English sentences are translations of phrases like “God willing,” I put that in there a lot. That’s a translation of the phrase inshallah, which people say all the time. When you hear people saying it English it sounds overdone but it is really what people are saying in Arabic.

5Wed: But it’s idiomatic? People aren’t trying to invoke God every time they say it.

SMD: Exactly. They’ll say something like, “The Orioles are playing tonight. They will win inshallah.” It can be a very casual thing.

5Wed: Your stories are as rooted in character as they are in place. When you’re starting out a story which is the stronger pull?

SMD: I’m definitely more motivated with character. Like with Abu Sufayan, why is he able to not go along with everyone else in the village? His wife and his son are participating when they want to take revenge. Why is he that way and what problems will that cause for him later on? And then I became interested in his granddaughter who hides his secret that night and later on has her own secrets to hide. I definitely am fascinated by character and I think that’s one way when you’re writing about unfamiliar places your readers can still latch on to a familiar person. We all have wise elders in out lives, aunts who know everyone’s business for example. The characters feel familiar even if the place does not.

5Wed: “The Fall” is a story told in a male first person voice, very modern and very American. Was it difficult to switch gears like that?

SMD: That was the most familiar for me because I know that voice really well. It was really fun as a female writer to write from that working class, young, breezy male voice. I love that character. That story was interesting because I thought originally of telling the story from the perspective of the father. But the father is so...

5wed: Closed off?

SMD: Right. He tries not to think about what he did in the past and he’s just so immersed in his own sense of guilt. I thought, well, a father who’s like that would surely have an impact. That personality when you’re a parent has ramifications on the children, so what are his kids like? I gave him one child and wrote it from the perspective of his son. That story I rewrote many, many times. But I’m proud of that story and have gotten a good response.

5wed: I also know that voice really well and you nailed it. The story “Ride Along” which appears in this issue of Fifth Wednesday is also in first person.

SMD: It’s a young man whose sister has been thrown out of their family by the father. She’s in college and she’s dating an African American man and so the main character is sort of going between the father and the sister. It shows the ugly side of the immigrant community.

5wed: After deciding to present in chronological order, did you write them in that order?

SMD: Not really. The third story I wrote is actually the last story in the book.

5wed: The Christmas story?

SMD: I never thought of putting it in the book and then later as I realized I was working on a collection, I rewrote it in a substantive way to help it tie into the book. Originally my two characters were not related to the village, then I gave my female character a link; she’s the step-daughter of Amira so it was a different kind of story. It was much longer than the others—originally I thought of titling the book Christmas in Palestine and Other Stories but then I felt it didn’t quite capture the mood of the whole book.

5Wed: That story does feels like a coda, like it is separate from the others.

SMD: Well, it was challenging too because again I was trying to show a lot of my characters leave the village and go to other countries but in this one I had a character who was coming back and noticing changes. And also that’s the story where I offer some criticisms of the Palestinian Authority, in the way that the Arafat regime was taxing people to death and making it impossible to build a state after the Oslo Accords. I felt like they were just as culpable as the Israeli military in making sure that it was difficult for people to return.

5Wed: You could interpret a political undertone in that title if it had been the title of the book—how much were you thinking about politics when you published these stories? Were you concerned at all that your work would politicized? How much of that was in your thinking as you wrote?

SMD: I thought about that a lot because I feel like “Palestinian” is automatically a political identity. If you tell someone you’re Palestinian American they immediately start talking politics with you, or it has been my experience that if they’re pro-Israeli they will often start contesting your identity. I had a college professor—I’ve written about this—who told me, “There’s no such thing as Palestinian people. Your family is really Jordanian.” I’ve had that experience many times so the Palestinian identity, whether we like it or not, is political. But I’m an American fiction writer and American fiction is character-driven and so that’s where I was going with this, hoping to really humanize a very political story. I was hoping my readers would look at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from that perspective. I deliberately did not insert a lot of politics in the story.

5Wed: A lot of the time, as you write it, politics are in the backgrounded, murmured opinions, the back channeled thoughts about global events—while your characters are experiencing real life, for lack of a better term. “Intifada Love Story” is the story where the reader is most aware of a global political situation and its impact on the personal.

SMD: It’s funny, when you’re writing fiction you’re doing a lot of stagecraft. I want to bring out the tensions of these characters, so I had to think: what situation can I put them in that will bring out those tensions? What I was really focused on was the frustration of this young man. I wanted to get him to be stuck in the house with his family. I had heard from relatives about how after a skirmish the military will literally find the tallest building in the village and turn it into their post. The family in the house is locked down because of that. So that’s what I did: I had him locked in the house with his family and I had the military right there on the roof. Every scene of the story is told from a day to day perspective: Day one, day four... And I could track the mounting frustration of the family in that way. That was an interesting story to write because you don’t want to demonize the other side. That’s another kind of struggle I have as a writer, to not demonize either side. You want the reader to trust you and a lot of the elements are based on things that actually happened to people I know.

5Wed: Let’s talk about you as a writer. Did you have a clear moment of epiphany when you decided you were going to write?

SMD: I think I’ve always wanted to be a writer. As an elementary student I was writing stories in leftover notebooks from the school year. My father and my uncle are both poets and I grew up in a house where reading was highly encouraged. My father recited Arabic poetry from memory. In the middle east the oral tradition is still very intense. My father has volumes of poetry he’s memorized and he will sit at breakfast and recite a few lines from something. I grew up with the sounds of poetry and literature.

5wed: This was in Philadelphia?

SMD: Yes, before the era of Nintendo Wii and other such distractions. I read a lot. We went to the free library every Saturday and loaded up on books. I loved to read. Never saw an Arab character in a book. I thought growing up as an Arab American that literature was about Caucasian characters. My favorite book growing up was Anne of Green Gables. I still love that book. But I thought literature involved people who were not like me. At Rutgers University my professor there, Lisa Zeidner, a great writer and novelist, said to me, “You’re Palestinian American right?” I said, yeah. She said, “So why are you writing stories about people named Heather and Jennifer?” And believe it or not, I had never really thought I could create literary stories about Arab American characters. I started to read books by African American writers. Alice Walker is a big influence on me. Latina writers like Julia Alvarez and Esmeralda Santiago’s book When We Were Puerto Rican—I love that book. Also south Asian writers. Probably my favorite writer is Rohinton Mistry. He’s one of those writers who just drops words into the text. I learned from other ethnic American writers how to write about my own community. In fact the title of my book comes from a book by Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, where he talks about the deep south as an unknown territory, a curious land. And I felt that way about Palestine. People think they know what Palestinians are like, but I’m going to show them in this book what they’re really like. I was thinking, for example, of Alice Walker. She’s very critical of the black community and I knew I was going to be critical as well. I knew I was going to write about these traditions, even the ones I find abhorrent, because I want my reader to trust me. Because this community is very politicized, if the reader is going to trust what I say about the Israeli military using the family water tank as a urinal, they’ll trust me if I write critically about other traditions, like hanging up the bed sheet on the wedding night.

5Wed: I also want to ask some Paris-Review type questions about your writing habits.

SMD: Oh good—I’m always happy to answer those questions because I like reading about the habits of other writers.

5Wed: Me too. So how disciplined are you in terms of your writing time? What’s your routine?

SMD: I’m very disciplined. I have three young children and I have to make time for myself to write. It’s funny because I have friends who get up early in the morning to exercise and they say if you get up early in the morning you’ll feel good the rest of the day. I’ve adapted that for my writing. For the last 15 years I’ve been getting up at 4:45am, I make a pot of coffee, and at 5 o’clock I sit down with my words.... It’s not always writing. Sometimes I’m stuck. But I’ll always do some reading or some journaling for two hours, from 5-7.

5wed: What do you write on?

SMD: It depends. If I’m writing nonfiction I’ll often write on a lap top. If I’m writing fiction I usually write longhand. My first major revision is when I type it into my laptop.

5wed: Cursive? Legal pad?

SMD: Yes! I have excellent penmanship and I write on yellow legal pad with a black gel pen.

5wed: Fine point?

SMD: No. The point seven millimeter. Sort of an in-between size.

5wed: You stay there for two hours no matter what?

SMD: Yes, and if I’m not writing I’m reading something. I just feel good when I’m done. I feel productive. I’ve moved something along. The rest of the day I don’t feel resentful of my busy schedule. I have children and work full time and that’s a very intense schedule. But I feel like I’ve had my time, so now I can give my time to other things.

5wed: And when you are stuck and reading instead of writing, what is it you’re reading?

SMD A lot of fiction. Sometime I read craft books. Benjamin Percy has a collection called Thrill Me which is a wonderful collection on writing craft. Zadie Smith’s essay collection Changing My Mind is wonderful. Deborah Spark has an essay book called Curious Attractions which is also wonderful. In terms of fiction I have shelves and shelves of things I’m reading, like Vyet Thanh Nguyen The Sympathizer, and he’s already got a new one out.

5Wed: Do you reread a lot of books?

SMD: Very rarely. But I do mark up my books quite a bit and I will go back and look through the passages I’ve marked. Colm Tobin has a novel called Brooklyn, and the other day I was marking it up because he has a scene were he handles time really well. The main character reflects how three weeks have already passed since she’s been in America and she’s relating what happened to her in a series of letters home. I thought it was a great way to do that which didn’t seem artificial.

5Wed: It’s like your collecting material for your own in book on craft.

SMD: Well, as a writer you’re always learning, always figuring out how other people have done it, taking notes. I feel like I’ll probably be that way forever. I hope I’ll be that way forever.

5Wed: Can I ask what you’re working now or are you superstitious about talking about it?

SMD: Isn’t that funny that people are so superstitious about that stuff? I’m working on a novel, not a short story collection, set in Philadelphia in the 1970s shortly after the Vietnam war. I’m still finishing the first draft and my agent is waiting for it. I write very slowly. There are two major characters, one of whom is a young woman whose had a baby out of wedlock and she’s been sort of thrown out of the family by her immigrant parents but she remains in touch with her sibling. The other major character is a young man who has come back from the war.

5Wed: Is it difficult to transition from thinking in terms of the short story to the novel?

SMD: I’m reading to learn how to do it. I’ve thought of my collections as bigger pieces but I’m telling the story in a more fragmented way. This is different. I’m reading a lot of novels to see how they’re done and I just read a great one, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong by Aimee Phan, a young Vietnamese writer. I love how she tells it because she switches points of view, inserts fragments of letters from people. I love the model she came up with. I’m really big on structure, on story structure.

5Wed: Do you enjoy teaching? Does it impact your writing?

SMD: When I’m teaching—I just came back from the summer residency and Fairfield University where I taught a workshop—I just leave that environment with so much energy. There is something very empowering about looking at a student’s story and saying, here is where it works and here it where it needs improvement. And then sitting with them and working on making those improvements. It shows you that anyone can get better at telling a story. It’s also empowering because sometimes the improvement that needs to be made is simply shifting the point of view. I make them write each scene on a separate postcard and then we lay out the cards. I borrowed this trick from somebody, it’s not something I came up with. But we lay out the postcards and now we have the skeleton of the story and I say, is this progressing? Is this moving forward? What if we take the last scene and put it at the beginning of the story and work our way backwards. Would that build the suspense a little bit more? Would that intensify the telling of the story? Would that invest the reader sooner than the reader is invested now? It’s interesting and fun to do and forces them to take a second look at a story. And I leave with a lot of energy. On the train ride home I was just writing like crazy. It triggered a lot of my own ideas.

5Wed: A lot of writers complain that having to read so much student writing and say it subtracts from their own creative energy, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with you.

SMD: No, I really enjoy it. For me, because my life is busy and I spend so much time with children, when I’m teaching I feel I’m with people who care just as much about the written word as I do. That’s a very nice community to be with, to sit and talk about a single sentence for a half hour because it matters to all of us. I look around and I think, these are my people. This is my tribe.

5Wed: That’s interesting since in so many of your stories, a sense of community is what drives your characters.

SMD: Right now I feel that way about the Arab American writing community. I’m on the board of directors of RAWI, the Arab American Writers Association. That community of writers is wonderful. When my publisher asked me to find people to blurb my book, every Arab American writer I asked was very happy to do it for me. I’ve tried to pay that back when I’m asked to blurb something or give feedback on a manuscript. I try to be a good citizen.

5wed: I was really interested in this idea of fronterizos –how do you define the term?

DDR: Somebody who throughout their lives go back and forth across the border, the geographical line we know of as the border. Their cultural identity is one based on both linguistic and cultural code switching. Along the border you usually get a “twin cities” feel as represented by El Paso and Juarez. A lot of us have this dual sense of cultural identity. A lot of us—and people in older generations too—remember when it was easy to go back and forth. There wasn’t a kind of extreme militarization there is today. It was nothing to go across the border and play with friends on the other side. There was almost this unified sense that both cities were the same. But there came a time, maybe in the late 80s, where all that began to change. Things became more militarized and separated. One feels now like you have to chose what side of that barbed-wire fence are you on. It becomes political to say, “I refuse to let a barbed-wire fence divide my mind.”

5wed: Have there been other moments in history like this?

DDR: I have a chapter in my book about the Bath Riots in 1917, where the closure of the US/Mexico border underwent a radical change. Before 1917 Mexicans were not at all considered illegal. They were part of the landscape of the southwest. That was before WWI and the Mexican revolution. You didn’t need a passport. The only interdiction was against the Chinese. The first calls for a border fence was back in 1904 by the local newspapers in El Paso was to keep out the Chinese who were illegal immigrants, not the Mexicanos. They had free access. Before 1919 there was this idea that goods and labor should travel free throughout the world. WWI changed things because there was an extreme paranoia that German spies were going to infiltrate the United States from the border. There were squads watching in El Paso who were convened the Germans were going to launch an air attack from Ciudad Juarez. And just like in Germany where there was a long series of anti-Semitic caricatures of the “dirty Jew,” here the idea of the “dirty Mexican” took hold, the “greaser” gained in strength because of the popularity of the Eugenics movement. Eugenics became the powerful impetus for the movement toward national closure. And that’s when on the US/Mexico border you get the first delousing camps. Every Mexican border crosser was considered a second class citizen and now not only needs a passport, but they also have to go through a very humiliating delousing process.

5wed: You wrote about one girl who refused to undergo that process.

DDR: Carmelita Torres. She was kind of the Rosa Parks of the US/Mexico border. She was out there with a trolley full of women and she refused to undergo this really humiliating treatment where they had to strip naked, and then be deloused. If they found any lice they would shave your head and then bathe you in kerosene.

5wed: You had to go through that every time you crossed?

DDR: No, actually it was just once a week. They would give you a ticket when you went through and then the next week you would have to do it again.

5wed: It seems to me then that even through rhetoric has changed, the level of paranoia really hasn’t. Or has the rhetoric changed? What’s different now, a hundred years later?

DDR: The US/Mexico border is part of what French historians call a “longue durée” history. It seems like the events themselves are superficial little blips, but a lot of the narratives are entrenched and never really change. Once in a while one part gets altered or de-emphasized in favor of another narrative, but the narrative is always used to produce anxiety of invasion. That can be genetic invasion, or [that immigrants will come and] harm the body politic. The Mexican revolutionaries were seen as bandits just like today, and now there are all these conspiracy theories that ISIS has camps in Juarez and along the border. Conspiracy theories are often rampant on the border, not just in the period my book looks at, but throughout WWII they had the same stories! That said the Nazis had ten thousand spies [on the border]. This was in the summer of 1940, when there was no way the German Luftwaffe could afford ten thousand spies. Outlandish conspiracy theories have always been part of, what I would say is the deliberate production of anxiety. So it’s not only Trump of course, but this has been going on for a long, long time. A century at least.

5wed: You live in El Paso. Is there something happening on the border that you’re seeing which hasn’t been reported much in the media? What’s it like near the border on a day to day basis that someone like me, living in the Midwest and getting news from the media, might not know about?

DDR: What do I see on a day to day basis? I’m very involved in trying to save one of the immigrant neighborhoods from being demolished to build a sports arena. I’ll give talks to groups of people, and a lot of them are young students from the Midwest and they’re learning to see border issues with their own eyes. Because of the media coverage they expect to see shootings, bullets from across the river, they don’t know about the richness, the subtle, cultural mixing that goes on here. That’s something that’s hard to capture because it seems like as soon as something it reported in an article, it becomes political. You almost have to come in the with the eyes of a novelist to see the small details which evade these national stories.

5wed: Life feels normal then, you aren’t under siege all the time.

DDR: Of course. People here don’t close their doors at night. You can walk down the streets of El Paso at 2am and no one’s going to assault you, whereas in other major cities I don’t think you could.

5wed: When you say novelist’s approach I think about Robert Bolano and the Ciudad Juarez section of 2666, which isn’t exactly the same spot—but your book, Ringside Seat to a Revolution, feels novelistic in many ways as well, though it’s a history.

DDR: I have a PhD in borderland history but I try to make very few concession to academic jargon. For me those little details, like a bullfight with a woman matador or tourists in the pyramids in 1896—these are micro-histories. Micro-histories, as I talk about them in my book, are much closer to literature. The eye of a novelist can see a small detail which opens up a window. The details open up the story. I found something in the national archives from 1929 which said one of the pesticides being used to delouse people in El Paso who were border crossers was Zyklon B. That one little detail, my heart jumps. That opens up the whole investigation. It takes me to Germany and into their archives and takes me to London. There is a photograph of Zyklon B being used at El Paso in a German pest control magazine in 1937, in article written by a man who was later indicted for crimes against humanity. So there’s all these incredible and rich connections. I didn’t start the book as a historian, I didn’t even have a PhD at this time, but I followed the direction of the city, and these micro-historical details led me to a whole underground.

5wed: It seems in reading the book that a lot of what you gathered was from talking to people, doing a Studs Terkel kind of interview and less historical research.

DDR: I’d say both. It was wonderful to sit down with people in their living rooms, getting that human dimension that you aren’t going to get from secondary sources, from the books that have been written. But I also did a lot of ground work in the basement of the El Paso public library, spending about three years reading every single newspaper chronologically. I started in 1893 and finished in 1923. I didn’t start writing my book until I read every word of those newspapers published in those 30 years.

5wed: These were daily papers?

DDR: Absolutely. The El Paso times the XX Herald. Something drove me to do that, to get the whole context.

5wed: Did you get any sense of how journalism itself has changed over the years?

DDR: It was so much better back then. They were better writers. They caught the essence—there was one particular local writer in El Paso, Norman Walker, just an excellent writer. But even back then they would make fun of some writers who would report on the Mexican revolution without stepping outside their hotel in El Paso. So not all of them, but lots of times when I would be reading these stories I would think, “man this is actual literature.” They just had an eye for quirky details. You still see some of that in the better places, but not at the local level. Local papers have become just fluff. They miss everything.

5wed: How did you decide to organize the material?

DDR: I didn’t organize it chronologically. In a sense there’s two parts of the book, both organized thematically. One is cultural, so I look at film, I look at photography; the role of musicians who were in the middle of the battlefields and played at executions. All those unexpected elements of the cultural terrain. And culture itself was part of the battlefield. And then the second part was where I charted the underground parts of the city. I called the second part “A City Divided,” and it talks about the fragmentation of the cultures, how the two sides of the border river are fragmented. I looked more on bifurcations and fragmentations and divisions. I’m not even looking at cultural terrain anymore. It’s almost like a series of short stories rather than one linear academic history book. When someone sets out to write a linear book I get annoyed. I think they’re imposing a linearity that’s not there in history. I get annoyed by a large majority of academic histories.

5wed: I see Howard Zinn blurbed your book. Was his method influentional to you?

DDR: This idea of a People’s History, a history from below, yes absolutely. My book starts out with people who traditional histories would have considered peripheral people. Individuals who very few people had heard about. Even people who were experts in the field would be surprised to hear about some of these stories. They know about Pancho Villa and four or five other men who [historians must assume] did all the shooting.

5wed: I didn’t realize he had so many wives!

DDR: That’s the thing—I look at his four wives and I try to find the details, the jewelry, where they live, where they walked in this psycho-geographical tour I write about. Most people will consider that the trivial stuff of a historical investigation, but no. It’s quite the opposite. It’s the heart of it.

5wed: Let’s end then by talking about some of that peripheral history under threat. You mentioned earlier a historical neighborhood being threatened by development. What can you tell our readers about this situation and how can they get involved if they wish to?

DDR: It’s called Durangito, and it was officially designated as El Paso’s first ward back in 1873. It’s basically where El Paso was born, the site of its foundational settlement. In 1827 it was a Mexican land-grant by Juan Maria Ponce de Leon. The city in 2016 decided it would destroy nine acres, four blocks of this neighborhood to build a sports arena for basketball. This land has more than a dozen historical sites, not only above the ground, but below the ground their are records indicated there was a confederate cemetery under part of the neighborhood. There are Native American artifacts, there are xxx which are irrigation ditches which were predominate in that whole of the southwest in Spanish times, and even before the Spanish colonization. They could be hundreds of years old. It’s a place that has all kinds of archeological richness including some of the last remaining structures from when El Paso had the largest Chinatown in Texas. When the railroad arrived most of the workers were Chinese, and hundreds of them stayed behind to live. People wouldn’t expect El Paso to be a global community but it was a major passageway from north to south and east to west once the railroad comes. You had everything you find in a major port city except that the port was inland. It’s a place that is incredibly rich in history and we think it’s an utterly bad idea for the government to destroy something that can turn into an “old town Durangito” which could bring in tourists from everywhere. Albuquerque has one and so does San Antonio. Our city is very nearsighted and they don’t see the worth of historical preservation to develop a city. They’d rather have a big box sporting arena which will be public subsidized. They’re talking about it costing 250 million dollars from people’s taxes for what we essentially see as corporate welfare. But the worst part is that it’s going to destroy history and displace people. It’s already displaced 40 mostly immigrant, mostly elderly families. If your readers wanted to learn more about the project they can look at the facebook page which is “ XXX .”

DL: Your novels are language centered. Obviously with Gertrude Stein in Salt but then also even more with the words and the flavors for synesthesia in Bitter. How did you arrive at those matchings?

MT: At first I was trying to match the words and the flavors as I was going and I realized it was taking way too long. Let’s say for example the word Linda which triggers the flavor mint. That was obviously much more important because I was going to use it so much in the book. As I was writing I tried to come up with the flavors and just decided it wasn’t that important and it was taking me too long. I needed it to be random and you know when you’re trying to come up with something that’s imitating randomness it’s almost impossible. Also flavors tend to have a lot of cultural meanings. Lets say the flavor of cherry. First of all it has like a sexual meaning and it triggers all these things, and if I had intended it to do that then that’s great. So in the end I just wrote my dialogue and then made a list of all the flavors I remember from the 70s in North Carolina.

DL: So those pairings then had nothing to do with the sound of the word or the meaning of the word?

MT: Right. Because that isn’t how it worked for her. Although it is true if it was a homonym it triggered the same flavors, “there” and “their.”

DL: And in the letters she writes and reads the words don’t trigger flavors which I thought was maybe why you included a good number of written correspondences.

MT: And also I would imagine that for her it also be a relief. You know, a different medium.

How did you select “Walnut” for God. You had to think about that somewhat. Couldn’t be random.

No, that really had to be random. It couldn’t be a sour flavor because then a reader could read into it that there could actually be a meaning, a rational meaning why God would trigger a sour flavor or a sweet flavor.

Or bacon.

The God of flavors! No, it couldn’t work that way.

Before you were a novelist you practiced trademark law. There must be a connection to that and the language playfulness of Stein and the word synesthesia of Bitter.

When you work in a large law firm you need to be protected. Litigation is a huge department, and intelectual property law, which is what trademark falls under, is a much smaller department. One of the clients of the department I worked for was Boy Scouts of America. My law firm was defending them against girls who wanted to be boy scouts, gay boys who wanted to be boy scouts, and I didn’t want to do that work and I told them I didn’t want to do that work. They basically said if you tell us one more client you don’t want to work for you’re out of here. I knew my days in litigation were numbered. Trademark I didn’t even really understand until I was practicing. I left the large firm and went to a botique law firm that did Trademark, and our clients were entities like Children’s Television Workshop. The Muppetss are very litigious, as you can imagine. One of the highlights of my trademark career was, do you remember when Snoop Doggy Dog became Snoop Dog? I was the junior attorney on that case.

Both your books are also very food centered.

I’m pretty much food obsessed, it’s true. When I first started writing it was a real big concern for me because as an Asian American writer to write about food kind of puts you in a cultural ghetto. Historically Asian American writing has centered around food. One, it’s easier because Asian Americans, a lot of us, actually are food obsessed. But two, it makes it easier, more palatable for editors to sell. I thought, do I really want to do this to myself? But it’s really what I think about. It’s how I view the world. Through a croissant. So why shouldn’t I write about the world through lovely, buttery layers of dough.

For Book of Salt, how much of the research came from Gertrude Stein’s writing and how much from other sources?

My research wasn’t that directed, I saw Brassai’s photos but it was more because I was interested in seeing images of Paris. Then I saw that he had a collection of letters home and I thought this is interesting: a young man in Paris and he doesn’t have a lot of money, and from that I got the price of underwear, the price of a meal, the weird little minutia that Stein and Toklas wouldn’t be interested in because money wasn’t an issue for them, though it was an issue for their cook.

So interest in the period came first?

It began as a short story. I’ve always admired the short story more than the novel. A short story writer has to really be economical with words and I love that. I love that sort of precision. So I wrote a short story that became the second chapter of the novel. But the character wouldn’t leave, so it became a novel.

How did you go from historical to autobiographical?

North Carolina, and this is pretty clear from the book, but North Carolina was a difficult place for me to grow up. I really did grow up in a town called Boiling Springs, so all that is autobiographical. I could have gone into therapy. Instead I spent seven years writing about this place to get it out of me. And it actually did because when I started I was 35 and I still incredibly angry about those three years being in that little place. It really did shape my personality. When I first started writing it I had no idea what this book was going to be about. I just knew I wanted to revisit it. I knew the book was going to be about synesthesia and I wanted to set it in the American south, in this town, and part of the process was that I had to go back to it physically.

So it really was self discovery, just as it is for Linda. I was impressed with the way you handled that moment where she finally learns about synesthesia in such an undramatic fashion.

There is almost this kind of willful suppression of difference. In order to really function in the world with synesthesia, it often means, one, this is the way I am and I can’t imagine the world any differently. And two, if I acknowledge that this is so different from everyone else then I have to acknowledge that I’m a freak. All that gets pushed back and people just function and live and suddenly they’re having a conversation with someone else or they hear about it in some strange way.

They don’t walk around thinking I’m so interesting, I should do more research on me.

Right. It’s not like that at all. In fact there are people I’ve known for a long time who will tell me they have synesthesia and they’ve never mentioned it. A gal who I worked with at the law firm, an attorney, who very interestingly is now a painter, she has the form of synesthesia where you see colors associated with people. It’s not the same as seeing an aura. It’s different. I don’t know how it’s different, but you have to trust me, it’s not a hippie kind of aura thing, it’s like when they think of you they see a specific color. Everything about you is assigned that color.

Is there some sort of evolutionary strategy for synesthesia?

The think that children, babies, are all born with it. As adults we have walls between the senses and babies don’t have these walls. For them the world is just this massive sensory overload. That’s the theory. I don’t know, I don’t have children.

They do make a lot of noise.

They’re responding to everything: flavors, sounds. I actually know a novelist who has the form of synesthesia Nabokov had, which is that when you see text you see the letters in different colors. My friend, her version of it, every letter has a different color and sometimes a certain color overwhelms a word and will give the whole word a wash. I actually think more people have synesthesia than are willing to admit it.

Your stories come out in spirals with lots of interwoven threads. Is that by design?

I don’t think linearly. I like to write in a first person voice because it’s someone telling you a story and people don’t talk linearly. They prioritize because they want to emphasize something or hide something so it unspools in their own specific way. I can get away with being nonlinear with a first person voice. I also like occupying someone else’s linguistic storehouse. You have to learn how they use certain words, their cadence. I like that. It’s also rather constraining. I’ll give you an example. In Salt, in one of my drafts I used the word road kill. Road kill didn’t exist in that period. Even though I’m in the head of the cook and not actually trying to recreate exactly what he would say to you.

It’s tricky because he’s not even really speaking French.

No. He couldn’t be speaking French. He’s speaking Vietnamese, his thoughts. And it’s not even thoughts—it’s trying to match up words for a man who doesn’t have any words.

How do you keep track of it all when writing?

I use note cards to keep track of the threads of the story. I was actually very, very lucky when I was doing the final draft of Book of Salt. I had a Lannan Fellowship and they give you a whole house. I had the whole house to work with.

You had the whole draft on note cards? Written by hand?

Yes. I would break down the chapters so that each would be five or six note cards and then I could place them around the house so I could physically walk through them, because I couldn’t see it anymore. That happens by the last draft. I would make little notations after awhile that certain chapters were in Paris and certain chapters were in Saigon by putting in the corner a P or an S. It would be asking a lot of readers to just follow Binh in his head where ever he wandered. There had to be something a little more concrete that will allow you to understand what was happening. That’s why it went back and forth. It was simply Paris then Saigon, Paris then Saigon. Whether you’re very conscious of it or not, that was the rhythm. You teach a reader how to read your book.


With the second novel you have a little bit of historical information about North Carolina mixed in with the narrative as well as her relationship with that bit of the history.

I really love that part of that novel. During the editorial process people were asking, why is this history here? Part of me wanted to say, use your head. Her own history was a mystery to her, so why wouldn’t history be something of interest? Especially the history of where she supposedly comes from. Also, when I was living in North Carolina you learned your state history in grammar school. That was part of her intellectual life as a kid, these stories of her state. The stories of statehood and the esteemed citizens of the state are sort of like a creation myth. Why did North Carolina exist? Where did we come from? What stock did we come from? And it’s all meant to convey something to children, like all stories told to children. We’re Tar Heels, we can’t be pushed from the battle ground.

You mentioned Harper Lee in the end notes to your book and what an impact she had on your writing. Who else had that kind of an impact? I assume Gertrude Stein was important.

I didn’t study Stein when I was in college. I knew of her work but I never took a class on her. I really came to her through Toklas. And that’s why I think I wasn’t intimidated by Stein. I think if I had studied her I would understand what a stupid foolish endeavor it was. Talk about setting yourself to be whipped by every single Steinian out there. So I wouldn’t really say she was an influence. I’ll tell you an author that I’ve only recently started to read and I’m just so enamored with her. Marguerite Yourcenar. She’s a Belgium author and wrote in French she wrote Memoirs of Hadrian which was published in the 50s. It’s written in the first person voice of Hadrian and it’s really masterful. And she has at the end notes about writing the novel. If I was teaching a class on writing the historical novel I would use those notes as the handbook for approaching the enterprise because it is so clear and concise and has so much knowledge distilled into so little words. I’m working on a historical novel now and I’m going to use it as my guidebook.

Do you teach at all?

I’ve only taught one class.

Did you like it?

It was a fiction writing workshop at Princeton when I was a Hodder Fellow there. The Hodders were still teaching then. It was intro to fiction for undergrads and seniors so it was a mixed bag. I found it very awkward. I had never taken a workshop and here I was trying to use a format I didn’t really understand. And I’m not convinced of my power to convey the information that’s needed. I wouldn’t say it was enjoyable because it’s like the first time you have sex. It’s not enjoyable because you don’t know what you’re doing. But it gets better. Right? And it was an intro class so it’s not like they were all thinking they were going to become poets or novelists. Out of ten there was maybe one student who from the very first piece I read, clearly had it. And I said, Oh this person is a writer. Or can be. But you can’t just teach to one person. You have to teach to everyone and I was never sure that I gave the other nine what they were looking for. And the sad thing was that one writer, the one who was really talented, didn’t give a shit about the class. I finally gave her some real world advice. I said, you’re a really talented writer but you have to pretend that you’re paying attention. The performance of paying attention is going to get you really far. But I would like to teach again because let’s be honest, that’s how you survive as a writer. Especially in the states. I’m not a prolific enough novelist, I can’t pump out a book every three years.

There is always the prizes. Why don’t you get one of those Genius grants?

Right. I feel like those things that are anonymous are kind of traps in the sense that, especially living here in New York, I’m sure I must have pissed someone off who’s on the nominating committee. Maybe I spilled a drink on someone or fell asleep at one of their readings. Or maybe it’s for other reasons too like perhaps I’m not a genius, that sort of thing. You’re smart because on a farm in Illinois you probably think, “No one knows who I am here, I should be in New York.” But if you’re in New York you could have been spilling drinks on people.

Agreed. Staying on the farm probably is my ticket to a genius grant. Or a “so called” genius grant as they call them now.

I don’t think they ever actually referred to them as Genius grants.. It was just everyone else who called it that.

They should officially call it the “So Called Genius Grant,” and then the people who win them are “so called geniuses.”

Sounds very much like My So Called Life.

How did you pick Brooklyn to have your writer’s studio?

Do you know about the residency for Women writers on Widbey island off the Puget Sound? Hedgebrook. Two of the gals who’ve been there decided they wanted to do something like that here in New York. So they started a space called Powder Keg. I’d been to Hedgebrook and I know what the ethos is like and I really liked the space, so it’s a pretty easy choice. Also it’s not like a cubical situation. I wasn’t interested in creating an office-like kind of routine. That’s the difference for me. I have my own desk where I can put my own things. But also this walk! It takes me actually 40 minutes to get there so it feels more like a ritual than a routine which is really important for me as a writer. I’ve done the nine to five thing as a lawyer. Nine to midnight. I didn’t want to feel like I was beholden to some space or some time limit.

Are you a page count or a set time at the computer writer?

No. Niether.

So what does a good day VS a bad day of writing look like to you?

I had a really bad day yesterday. I’m trying to write an essay about the editing of an anthology I worked on in 1996, called Watermark. A bad day is when I feel like I can’t put together even a single sentence. And that happens. It feels like the words are just refusing to assume their positions. Part of it is that it just made me feel old to work on the piece. The essay is about working on Asian American literature in the 90s, as if we were talking about the 1890s or something. I feel like saying, can’t you just remember? So it felt like a horrible day. A really great day is when I write, say, 20 pages. I’ve only had maybe five days in my writing life where I’ve written 20 pages and then collapsed. New text, not editing.

Are there things you can do bring about that kind of production? Caffeine?

I think it’s best when I can get away from all this. Even though I’ve had the space since September and I try to go there every weekday, I still feel my best writing has taken place when I’m away at a residency. Really away. That’s the difference between adopting more of a normalized schedule. To me pushing it would be to say I won’t leave my desk until I get 5,000 words. I’ve heard writers work that way and it’s great for them but I don’t think it would work for me. When I've tried to do that it’s been a disaster. What comes out is useless to me.

Morning hours versus afternoon hours.

Late morning until seven or eight o’clock. But when I’m away I actually prefer to write at night time. Left to my own devices I would write at night because it’s endless. It feels like an endless possibility and that works for me.

Music on, music off?

Depends. I can listen to music that I’m really, really familiar with when I’m writing. Even if it has lyrics because I don’t have to think about it. But I can’t listen to new music. I prefer music to no music. And that’s one of the great things about being in the residency because the space is yours as opposed to here, where I love it but I’m sharing a loft and I can hear other people, see other people. One of the best ways to blow off steam is to sing along to music. And sometimes when it’s not working for me, the writing, I just want to sing along. But I think it’s part of growing up as a writer. I can’t always go away to a residency. I do have a partner and a life here. I’m trying to teach myself how to do it here.

Do you show your drafts as you go?

For Salt and for Bitter I didn’t show anybody anything until the very end. I do have a group of four or five people, not necessarily writers--one’s a poet, one’s an academic, one’s a fiction writer--who I show my drafts to. You can’t rely on one person’s response, even if that one person is your editor.

Or yourself.

For sure not yourself. That’s when you know the book is finally finally done. When you can’t really see it any more at all. Words become weirdly empty of meaning or you’re all of a sudden not sure if they mean what you intend them to mean.

Do you like Drafting or Revising better?

Given those two choices it’s revising I like better. But really the best part is when you write that last line and you know it’s the last line. I only have two novels but both times I knew. With Bitter it was a little different because I knew what the last word had to be: stay. And I actually had that word on a note card on my desk the whole time. But that will probably never happen like that again. Which is one of the saddest things about writing a novel. You learn how that particular novel should be written and you can’t necessarily apply those lessons to the next novel. As I begin thinking about this third novel I don’t think the lessons of the past two are going to help.

You still do note cards before the typed draft?

I don’t do the note cards until the very end. Ass-backward. I don’t start with an outline. It might change depending on the book and the subject, but I do think that there is something kind of alchemy to the process of writing the novel. And the novel, I want to believe, is telling itself to me, and I’m not telling it what it should be. And to preserve that fiction for me I don’t think about it as a yarn, but like a Fiddlehead fern unspooling itself for me. It’s much more intricate than just one line. It’s a fractal that going to reveal itself. And I love to see where it’s going to take me.

A long time fixture of the Chicago art scene, David Hauptschien is mostly known for plays and spoken-word events, but he also works as a visual artist, notably in photography and film. His name remains synonymous with the sort of fierce, iconoclastic truth-telling he brings to all his projects. Mr. Hauptschien has lived with his wife Lois in the same apartment near Chicago for decades, and on a recent weekday afternoon, surrounded by his paintings and a large collection of the books and records which inspire him, he sat down with Fifth Wednesday to talk about his varied career. A natural raconteur, Mr Hauptschein tells stories with a manic energy that rarely flags, even as he hops up to make a point by playing a Frank Zappa song, laughing at lyrics he’s heard a thousand times before. His unique voice and uncompromising vision can be as abrasive as it is delightful, but as he explains, he’s always aiming to find the deepest truth that only art can express.

Fifth Wednesday: Do you consider yourself a Chicago artist? You weren’t born here originally.

David Hauptschein: I’m from Philadelphia but I’ve been here since 1978 so I’m a Chicago artist definitely.

5W: What brought you here originally?

DH: Graduate school. University of Illinois, Chicago. I came to study photography but I never made a single photograph, which is typical for me. Luckily the teachers there let me do what I wanted and I made an animated movie called “Fecundation,” which was made with clay and razor blades. I liked the quality and texture you could get animating with clay. I did it in an unusual way: I zoomed in close and really focused on the texture of the clay and the razor blades which filled the entire frame. It wasn’t like little Gumbies moving around. My inspiration was exploring bio-morphic, sexual, fecundity type themes but in an abstract manner. Obviously there were no human parts in the movie, just shapes.

5W: The shapes were suggestive?

DH: Sure. The film got shown all around the world and I got into trouble with certain people at the time which really shocked me. I was accused of having produced something that was violenced against women. This was a segment of the viewers, not all of them. But there was enough where it was clear I got some people upset. I was exploring sexual sensations and, the violent nature of sex even when it’s between two consenting adults. An orgasm is a violent thing, in a sense. I certainly wasn’t trying to advocate this. My own personal life has been very conservative—I’ve been with the same woman since I was 20. It was just an exploration of feelings and wasn’t literal. This was in 1981 and the feminist movement had turned more narrow with certain radicals. But the thing that was so absurd about these criticisms—and I’m only focusing on this because it’s an ongoing theme with literal thinkers that I’ve encountered during my entire career, people putting a literal stamp on something that was meant to be ambiguous and open-ended—in this movie there were phallic forms that got chopped up by razor blades there were vaginal forms that got chopped up by razor blades. I’m actually making it sound worse than it is because I’ve since put it on YouTube and lots of people have seen it and that reaction has not come up again. It was a product of the times. More people have seen it lately than when it was originally produced and no one’s said—in fact I had one friend who saw it recently and said, “Wow I remember this being disturbing. It’s actually quite beautiful.”

5W: But isn’t that the risk of being abstract? That’s you’ll run afoul of some zeitgiesty current?

DH: Any time you do a work of art and put it out for the public it could be misunderstood or interpreted in a way that is unexpected. I’m okay with that, that’s part of what makes art interesting, and I’m only pointing it out because there’s a lot of literal thinking going on right now, and it’s hampering development of the arts. Generally we’re slipping into more concrete thinking and being less open to other possibilities in all the arts. There is definitely a back-sliding since the innovations of the 20th century which began with let’s say Van Gogh all the way up to minimal art and pop art some of the things that Samuel Beckett did. If Beckett came up with Waiting for Godot today, just out of nowhere, it’s not too likely you’d get any major theater to put it on.

5W: I want to ask you how you managed to have the confidence to go from visual artist to play writing, but maybe we should start with where your first artisitic leanings came from.

DH: I became an artist in one day. I had an epiphany. I was totally lost—I’m dyslexic and I didn’t do well in school. I managed to get by using my wits and I even had to plagiarize a couple of times. The only thing I can say good about my first two years of college is that I was so miserable I was forced to seek a solution to my problems. I became a hippy for awhile but when my friends started drifting off into narcotic despair I realized that was a dead end. Two incredible things happened to me. When I was nineteen, a friend showed me a book that was half Dali, half Juan Miro. I’d ever seen anything like this before. I came from a background that was supportive, upper-middle class, everyone became a doctor or lawyer, but there was no discussion of art. No one was a painter, writer, musician, nobody. I hadn’t ever been to a museum I don’t think. And I saw this and I just thought, wow. I knew I wanted to be creative, I just didn’t know how. In my school the people who took arts were looked at as the dumb kids or the not college material, but I signed up for an art class, partially to meet girls, but also I thought there could be something there. The night before I couldn’t sleep. I had this weird feeling that something

was going to happen. I got to the class after maybe four hours of sleep. It was an all day class, simple design project which required no technical skills, just working with squares and triangles. After two hours of working on it this amazing sense of euphoria came over me. I’ve never had a religious experience but it was, I think, like what someone feels when they think they’ve seen God. It was centered around the thought, “I’m going to be an artist, this is what I’m going to do with my life.” Since then there has only been a couple of times where I went two months, three months, without making art due to illness or family tragedy or something like that. I’ve had one or two bad days here and there but I’ve never doubted my conviction that I wanted to be an artist. And if someone back then had said your career is going to follow the path it followed, I would have said that’s impossible. Nothing went the way I thought it would go. This fits what I was saying about concrete and literal thinking. Some artist lock themselves in a particular way of working and they may work great for ten years, but the rest is rehash or suicide in some cases because they can’t change. That’s what happened to Jackson Pollock. He knew he couldn’t keep doing those drip paintings, but he couldn’t allow himself to relax and seek something else—even if it meant failure. Being adaptable as an artist is part of going into the unknown which really attracts me. When I wake up in the morning my first question is am I doing something that I think is good. And if the world doesn’t see it my way I’m okay. I’d rather they did see it my way but if they don’t I’m okay. It’s when I think my work isn’t good that I have a problem. Also, something to add to that is, the world doesn’t need to know what I think of my own work. In fact my opinion of my own work is only relevant to me. All that matters is I follow my voice as honestly and as truthfully as I can without selling out, without compromising, and just proceed exploring what interests me.

5W: How did that transition come about?

DH: I developed a very rare and undiagnosed eye problem. I was doing a lot of very eye straining work for many years and I started to develop pain and light sensitivity around my left eye. Long story short it’s probably some sort of nerve disorder. My vision is still very, very good but I can’t do eye straining work. I can’t read. I can’t for more than just a few seconds watch movies. I haven’t been in a movie theater since 1980, I think it was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was faced with a major dilemma which was how do I continue as an artist? I went through a very rough period but I finally started dictating fiction into a tape recorder. I also found out that you could get books on tape. That was a major revelation because I had trouble reading books because of my dyslexia. But when I could listen to them there was no cognitive problem at all. I could read Dostoyevsky, I could understand everything fine. So for a couple of years I just listened to talking books, training myself how to construct a sentence, how to express myself in writing. There was a slow curve before I could write in a way that was any good, and the real breakthrough occurred when I stopped using tape recorders and started using a human assistant, who happened to be my mother at the time.

The one good thing is I could still go to theater. I could see a play without hurting my eyes. I couldn’t focus on a screen but with live theater I could move my eyes around, adjust my focus, that sort of thing. I had already been interested in theater—in fact before coming to Chicago I had seen a play by Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, and it was like the Salvador Dali thing for me where I was like, wow, I had no idea theater could be hip. I started getting involved with the performance art scene in Chicago. It started with me curating and hosting spoken word events. Gradually I began to expand my idea—I didn’t call it performance art because I didn’t want it to be pretentious, and I didn’t want the focus to be on me. I did this long series over about ten years where the audience was invited to participate and each show would have a theme. One was the letters show for example. These shows were popular with the audiences and at times with critics.

5W: I first encountered you in Chicago at your “Letters Shows” in the 90s maybe? Early 90s? These were really amazing events. Do you want to describe them and talk about how you got the idea?

DH: We put out advertisements which said bring a letter: it just has to be a real letter, could be found, could be a letter you wrote at 3am when you found your brother having sex with your girlfriend in your parents’ bed, could be a letter someone sent you from a mental hospital, it didn’t matter. Just had to be real. Depending on how many people came and signed up we would divide up the time. I would use an old fashioned egg timer and I’d say, we got 20 people so I’m going to set the egg timer for five minutes and when that timer dings you have to leave the stage. As the host I reserved the right on occasion to allow a person to finish or continue so it wasn’t extremely rigid, but it was democratic for the most part. The reason I didn’t call it performance art is I wanted people to be themselves when they came up to read and not try to read like a poet. I would do something too, like I would read one letter. Or I would tell a story when we had the True Story show. We had a Diary Show.

5W: The Diary shows were probably my favorites. You did a couple of those, right?

DH: All of these we did multiple times over a period of years. We only did three or four a year because I didn’t want to over-saturate the market—and I wasn’t trying to turn it into a career either. For me this was a side thing, something to do in the interim while I figured out how to get my writing going. But they were really good shows and I’m proud of them and people began to see them as a place you could come and bring the weirdest shit. I would be accepting of everything: it didn’t have to politically correct, you could reveal weakness, it didn’t matter. I would listen and be like, that writing is better than all the poets and fiction writers I was reading and listening to at the straight readings. I think it’s because when people try to write in an artsy sort of way they’re looking over their shoulder at what other people are going to think, but when you’re insane because you just caught your girlfriend cheating on you, you aren’t going to worry about your literary prowess. And you’re going to say stuff in an incredibly imaginative manner.

5W: And eventually these shows got so popular you got noticed by Ira Glass and NPR. In fact an early episode of This American Life was one of the Letter shows, right?

DH: We did two episodes. One called the Letters Show and one called The Cyberspace Show, which was the same thing as the Letters show but based on stuff pulled from the internet.

5W: Was it fun working with Ira Glass?

DH: I knew Ira from the local art scene. We weren’t friends but we knew each other, acquaintances. He knew what I was doing and when he started This American Life he invited me to do one of the shows. This was maybe 1996. Late 90s, something like that. I can’t remember exactly.

5W: Do you want me to look it up?

DH: Sure.

5W: 1996. It was called Letters, “Episode 36. Host Ira Glass and playwright David Hauptschien took out advertisements in Chicago inviting people to come to a small theater with letters they received, sent, or found.” That’s from their archive.

DH: Let me start with this right off the bat: I really dislike Public Radio. I have an aversion to it. Everybody who meets me has to endure my rant about Public Radio.

5W: We don’t have to talk about this at all unless it would amuse you to do so.

DH: It would amuse me to do so. I realize this goes against a lot of the people in my milieu but Public Radio is not doing its job.

5W: Which is what?

DH First of all if you listen to Public Radio you’ll hear only a very narrow set of ideas and stories. And no one there has any passion for the subjects they’re talking about. They all speak with vocal fry. I might be alone in saying this, but I think the vocal fry is a way of conveying this phony impression that you’re too cool to be ruffled by anything. You’re never going to pound the table. If you go to the gym and put a microphone where I’m having a conversation with the guy next to me, you’ll hear me ranting against Trump in a very unpleasant and animated manner. You might also hear me ranting about Obama. But I’m passionate. I speak with emphasis. I’m not holding back. But when speakers use fry they’re trying to show how disconnected and above it all they are. Which gets me back to the Ira Glass thing. We did these two shows together and in my view they didn’t go very well. Take for example the Cyberspace show. [Note to readers: This American Life episode 66, actually titled “Tales from the Net”] It was similar to the Letters show but with stuff people found on the internet, which was brand new then. So, Ira calls me up and says Peter Taub—who was the performance art creator at the Museum of Contemporary Art—contacted him about doing a show at the MCA about the internet which was really exploding. Ira said to me, do you want to do a Cyberspace show using the Letters format? I said, okay but it’s not going to work without my personality, he said, I agree. So we met with Peter Taub at the MCA, and those two guys kept talking about, “Well we want to discuss and discover how the web has changed the way we communicate.” I said, “Listen guys, that’ll happen naturally. What I need you to do is make sure in your ads,”—because these guys were handling the advertising, I was just going to co-host with Ira. “Get it out that the public needs to bring things to read.” That was most important. I didn’t like the way these meetings were going because I thought they didn’t get what I was up to. I felt like I was only there because Ira wanted to do a Hauptschien-type show but didn’t want to steal my idea. And I think that’s why he invited me to do the Letters show in the first place because everyone would know in the performance community, maybe not the Public Radio community, that he had gotten the idea from me. And I probably wasn’t the first guy to do this anyway but it’s just that my personality led to these shows having a quirky nature. I felt out of it from the start but it was Ira’s show and I didn’t want to mess it up for him.

I called a bunch of my friends and said can you bring something from the internet that’s funny, quirky, so that we at least know we have some people who are going to read. And the reason I was so insistent about this is that the advertising for the Letters show the previous year was through Public Radio, and it was the most boring, worst show I was ever involved in, because the people who showed up were Public Radio listeners reading open letters they had written to President Clinton! I read a real letter I had written to an entomologist. I found worms in my toilet and they came and went over a period of ten years, and I was convinced I had a parasite of some sort. I brought this entomologist samples and I wrote him a letter, and at the time I didn’t think I sounded crazy but when I read the letter later I sounded insane. Now, I had read this letter a couple of times at other shows and I always got a fantastic response to this—it’s a short letter but I tell the story about the worms and it lasts five minutes and I always got a fantastic response. Turns out it wasn’t a human parasite but a sewer fly. The entomologist took the larvae I collected to a conference and had it studied. It’s a great story.

5W: That would make a great segment for This American Life.

DH: Well, I started reading that letter and telling my story and the audience did not respond. Public Radio listeners didn’t get it! I mean they didn’t understand that it was supposed to be funny, that it was a joke. After the show Ira says, I don’t think we can include your segment in the show. I said, why not? He said, there wasn’t any laughter. I said, pipe in some laughter. He said, I can’t do that. I was like, why not? If you feel you need laughter put some in. I think he just didn’t like the story because it was gross. I understand now, but to me it seemed fine. I’m always shocked when people object to my material. It never even occurs to me. I never got into a fight with Ira—I wasn’t trying to take over his show. I wanted to see if I could reach a bigger audience but it didn’t work because the Public Radio crowd was so square it was unbelievable. Bunch of 25 year old grandmothers, you know? Munching on granola and living on nuts and vegan raw and knitting and hanging up portraits of cats and God forbid even being in a house where gluten is served.

5W: I’m guessing the cyberspace show didn’t go well either.

DH: I’m going to reveal something I’ve never revealed in public before.

5W: An exclusive for Fifth Wednesday?

DH: Just for your readers. So the first night of the Cybershow I told one guy to bring something I had found. He was an actor, and I said, come not as you, but come as this guy who wrote this rant I had found on the internet. So he showed up and he’s reading this rant, and eventually he crossed his time and Ira asked him to leave the stage. The guy stormed off, and on his way out he turned and said something somewhat nasty—nothing horrible, but he was mumbling and grumbling, and he stormed off and that was that. After the show people came up and were like, who was that guy? That was so bizarre.

5W: Who was the actor?

DH: Pat Healy who is now fairly well known. He works a lot in movies. We also had one guy who found a piece of writing about a balloon fetish. What this guy would do—and there were no curse words, no overt descriptions—but he would get together with a woman and put a balloon between them and hug and squeeze her until the balloon popped. Another guy brought something about a crutch fetish, that he liked to have women come at him who were on crutches. He read that. They weren’t dirty, just odd and disturbing. Then Ira did this thing about two men who were having cyber-sex using chat on a keyboard, and then one guy one day stops writing and the assumption was he had died of AIDS. When the show aired, everything I had done got cut out. Pat Healy got cut, the balloon guy got cut and the crutch fetish got cut. But the two men having cyber sex stayed in because AIDS is acceptable conversation on Public Radio. Worms in your toilet isn’t. Now, this is not a personal thing, I don’t have any beef with Ira, he treated me fine, it was a respectful situation, it’s more about Public Radio.

5W: Lets talk about your plays—how did you go from these spoken word events to writing plays and having them produced?

DH: I was going to theater continually at this time and learning about how people talked. I was fascinated with the natural flow of spoken language which in my opinion is much closer to our inner conscious. I also got all the literary magazines I could get my hands and had people read the stories to me. The shocking and surprising thing is most of the fiction sounded like it was written by the same person, or all the writers had gone to the same college, been in the same MFA program. It was all really, really dull. I thought to myself, how can this be? I’m going to these live shows were people are expressing themselves in a phenomenally vivid manner, and yet when people try to write for serious literary purposes they sound constipated. I became convinced that when we write we have more time impose the censor, we look over our shoulder and say, you’re not supposed to write it that way, that’s not how I was taught.

5W: Because they’re just communicating and not trying to create art? Which is what you’re interested in.

DH: I’m interested in art that’s alive. That has spontaneity to it. The beat poets tried this, “first thought best thought,” but actually even that’s too conscious. Everything I do I’m looking for the stuff that isn’t really planned. But I shape it, very deliberately, very detailed oriented, but I’m trying not to sound like everyone else. And I never took a writing course but I don’t want to sound like all the people who went to the Iowa school. Why do that?

5W: So when you start writing a plays then I’m guessing you don’t start with a plot, that for you it’s more voice and figuring out who’s voice is speaking?

DH: Usually what happens is there’s a small situation I’m working with. One play I wrote called When the Walls have Ears started off with some writing I found of some woman talking about having been implanted by aliens. She described it incredibly vividly. It was nuts but vivid. I thought this could be the genesis of something but how could I use it? She’s not really talking to anybody, but what if she’s got somebody tied up and the person’s gagged and they can’t talk back? She thinks they’re one of the aliens. I set this situation up where there’s two people tied up and they’re gagged and she’s going on this rant. That’s an interesting scenario but now I have to write a whole play. So where are they? Does she kill them? If so how does this happen and how do they die and I gradually worked backwards from there until I had an entire play.

The guy who’s been directing my plays, Julio Martino, he’s British and he’s directed my last seven plays and also the screenplay I wrote which is being edited as we speak, he’s always sending me weird stories and interesting anecdotes and things he comes across because he knows something might trigger my imagination. He called me up one day from England and read to me a few pages from August Strindberg’s so called occult diary where Strindburg believed he was having telepathic sex with his estranged third wife and that led to an entire play which was produced in London in 2010 called In Memory of Edgar Lutzen. Another time Julio sent me this little thing, it was written in broken English and it said something like, “Someone kill my dog Ling-Ling, if someone....” I can’t remember it right now. “Ling Ling head missing, want back,” something like that. I thought maybe there’s a play here. I started brainstorming and it took a long time, I started writing in broken English, and the way I did it is I had my assistant type out a line, then put it in Google translate into Japanese or Spanish, then translate it back to English, and if there was a weird word choice I would use it. For example, in the play there’s a scene where a guy comes across somebody with a bloody head trying to dig his car out of the dirt. It was like half buried. And so the line is, I went over to him and picked up the shovel and I helped him dig the land out of his trunk. I find broken English very poetic. Digging the land out of the trunk. So I went in there and I started making up a situation. Who is this woman, Ling Ling? I called her Ling Ling in my play but in real life the dog was Ling Ling. I created a situation where I had this old beat up house, one light bulb with a generator, a wind fan that would make the light flicker when it would go and gradually this thing started to shape. Consequently I find out this Ling Ling thing was a hoax, it wasn’t even a real thing with the dog’s head and I eliminated it from the play. Not because it was a hoax but because at some point the play had become something completely different than I had started with. All the original stuff was an avenue into a world that I couldn’t even have begun to imagine one day before I started. It’s not like I had been sitting around for two years trying to write a play about a hundred year pot of soup boiling on the stove and every day they add new ingredients to it and you’re never supposed to let it get down to the end. But I got there eventually. It’s the way I like to work.

5W: Describe process of working with an assistant.

DH: What happens is we get together on the phone. I dictate, and she reads back to me. It’s a very arduous process. The only good thing about it is because we’re speaking and usually it’s dialogue for a play, it’s closer to how people speak.

5W: Does she get frustrated? You said it’s arduous but it must be rough being on the other end.

DH: She gets frustrated, yes. Anybody would working with me because I’m obsessive and I go over things a thousand times.

5W: I’m imagining she’s reading lines to you over and over and you’re interrupting her saying things like, change that “Hey” to a “Hiya...”

DH: Right right. And it really goes on. She needs to decompress after our sessions. I am an incredibly detailed artist. That animated movie for example is only nine minutes long and it took me two and a half years working long hours. I am a perfectionist and I really try to make every detail fit and contribute to the work. But to keep it fresh I try to maintain a line to that part of my mind that isn’t censoring too much. It sounds like a contradiction but I have to keep both channels going.

5W: You don’t drink or take drugs.

DH: No, no no. I don’t drink because alcohol makes me sick and I don’t smoke pot because it makes me paranoid. I lead a very clean life. I’ve been with my wife since I was 20, I have a very stable existence in terms of my living arrangements. There’s a reason for that. I need the discipline because my mind is so unruly that if I started doing crazy stuff I would end up in a bad state. All my clear thinking, practical nature is a protective device.

5W: How does working with actors change what you have written?

DH: That’s really a great question. If I get in a situation where I have actors who want to be there—which has mostly been the case—who like what I’ve written and are excited about doing the role, it’s an amazingly good experience which goes back to what I said about getting to the truth. What I do is—and I did this a lot more earlier in my career—I bring a tape-recorder to rehearsals. Also to the shows. I record because in rehearsal the actor doesn’t necessarily have their lines totally memorized, and sometimes they’re reaching for a line and they come up with a line or a version of a line better than what I’ve written. It happens all the time.

5W: Is it hard to divorce your ego enough to let that happen?

DH: Ego is not an issue at all. In fact I get tremendous pleasure from putting a line in a play that I didn’t write, that an actor came up with, because it’s like a gift. To me there’s nothing more you could ask for. Why would my ego be disturbed by that? It’s a collaborative process and the beautiful thing is when it’s over and done the script still has my name on it. If a picture falls off a wall actors need to respond. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. Who doesn’t respond when a picture falls off a wall? I’ve seen that happen. An actor should get up, maybe curse, maybe kick the picture.

5W: Speaking of which I know there was sort of an infamous set breakdown during one of your plays, The Persecution of Arnold Petch, which was directed by Dan Sauer and starred Michael Shannon. Did you guys discover Michael Shannon?

DH: We didn’t discover him but Mike played the lead role in Petch. He was only 22 at the time.

5W: Is it fun to watch somebody have that kind of phenomenal success after working with him?

DH: Yeah sure, it’s fun. It’s interesting. Because I don’t watch movies with my eye problem I don’t get to see him act much except in bits and pieces. He’s a great actor—he was even great back then and I certainly didn’t discover him but everyone around him knew he was a great actor.

5W: And so what was the story? He put his hand through a window on stage?

DH: It wasn’t him, it was Wes Walker, another actor. We had a great set but we overlooked this one thing, which is you should never have real glass on stage. One of the characters opens a window and yells something. A freak accident occurred where the glass just shattered, came crashing down on his hands, and he was really cut badly. There’s only two characters on stage at this point, and I was in the audience having a fit not knowing what to do. Everyone thought it was stage blood. They couldn’t actually perform the scene the way it was written because it involved a fistfight. The other actor was improvising lines like, how’s that cut, and he was saying, I’ve had worse. He was wrapping it up in a dirty rag. Finally the other actor, Gary Wilmes who’s also having a great ongoing career, had the sense to cut the scene short. The scene was normally like eight minutes, it only lasted three minutes. They steal the guy’s money and went off stage. It happens that Mike Shannon, the main character, was supposed to come on next. But he thought he had another five minutes. He was in the bathroom. So they get him out of the bathroom, just go out there, just go out there. I thought they could tape his cuts and take him to the hospital after the show. I didn’t know how bad it was. Mike comes out on stage and he handled it very well, he looked around and there was blood and glass all over the stage and he turned to the audience and said one of our actors is injured and we’re going to have to stop the performance.

5W: Wow! Was that the right call?

DH: Hundred percent. For sure. Pat Healy, the guy I mentioned before, he was in the cast and I heard later when Pat saw the blood he threw up. He did not look good. They rushed Wes to the hospital and sewed him up. Next day he was in a lot of pain so his mother took him to another hospital where they opened him again, and they found, glass, paint, and dirt in his wounds. They stitched him back up and he now had both arms in slings. He could have died but he was so committed to the show he wanted to do the next performance. It happened on a Sunday and the next show was a Thursday. And this is why it’s the best story I’ve heard about working with actors: These guys were brilliant. It was Mike Shannon, Wes Walker, and Gary Wilmes. Both of Wes’s arms were in slings so we had to change the stage action. They couldn’t roll around on the bed and have a fight. Wes and Gary, with me present, had to rewrite the scene. The fight that took place between these guys is over the fact that the Wes character wants to smoke while they’re robbing the guy’s apartment. And the brother played by Gary says, you’re not supposed to smoke, he’ll smell the smoke, he’ll smell the smoke. The Wes character smokes anyway but not he can’t even light a cigarette. So the dialogue these guys wrote spontaneously was amazing. Better than anything I could have written myself. Wes says to Gary, give me a smoke. You aint’ supposed to smoke. Give me a smoke. You ain’t supposed to smoke. While this is going on back and forth, the Gary character is pulling out a cigarette, putting it into Wes’s mouth, and as he’s lighting the cigarette for him and saying, Don’t smoke Bobby, don’t smoke, don’t smoke. That was so much better than this fight scene. Now I have this brilliant scene that shows these two brothers interacting. It wouldn’t have happened without the actors which is why I love theater so much.

5W: And now that’s in the script permanently.

DH: That is in the script forever and when it was done in New York in a little theater which was a disaster but at least it was done, they did it that way. The fight’s gone. It’s published now and that’s the way it is and that’s the way it will always be.

5W: You’ve been around long enough to be a sort of unofficial historian of the Chicago theater scene during this turn of the century. Has anyone seen more local theater than you?

DH: Since about the early 80s I’ve gone to maybe one to three shows a week. With the exception of a few critics who see everything that comes out, yes, I’ve seen quite a bit of it. I’ve certainly been to every different theater company once or twice.

5W: And it seems to me that in the 90s there was maybe a golden period when there was a ton of little theater groups putting on original work and it was all loud and brassy. My sense is that’s not the case anymore.

DH: I’ll start by saying the medium of theater I truly love. Theater is kind of marginal art form generally. There are many theater groups around the country, but they’re very conservative, catering to people who want their views reinforced and don’t want things to be shaken up. Very square. They basically do the same fifty plays that are popular. The only place where I could get my plays done was large cities. Chicago has to this day an advantage over New York and London in that it’s cheaper to put up plays. Someone who just wants to do it can scrape up money to rent a storefront and do a play. It’s not cheap but it’s way cheaper than New York or London. And there is a ton of actors and a ton of directors here all trying to cut their teeth. Unfortunately lately it’s come to be a place where people want to work for a few years before going to LA and get in a sitcom like “Friends” or something. So yes, I think it’s changed dramatically. When I got into theater, just say like in Wicker Park where now there are no theaters, within a ten minute walk there were five. They were all small and doing crazy stuff. There are still small theaters around, but most of them are imitating the big theaters. Little Steppenwolfs and Little Goodmans, and in some cases they’re doing the same plays but a few years later. Somehow this attitude that theater was supposed to moralize and preach about the ills of our times became the dominant motivating factor: issue plays. Dysfunctional families. Last year someone did a play about the health care debate which I didn’t go to but that’s how it was advertised. And the real problem is it’s not having any impact on the culture because the people going to see the plays already know racism is bad. I never met anyone who said, you know, I thought it was good to be a racist until I saw this play. And these plays win Pulitzers, that’s how bad it’s gotten. I got into an argument with a young actor friend of mine, she was 29 at the time and we were talking about one of these plays, lots of moralizing, and I finally said, “Did you learn anything from the play?” And she said, “Well no, but there are things other people need to know.” So in other words yyyyou know better, and you like plays where your views are being affirmed while other people are learning lessons. Not that anyone is learning anything because, you know, everyone going to see this play probably lives in Evanston. You know, the racists from the blue collar neighborhoods who hate black people and think we should send them back to wherever, they’re not coming to this play! I don’t want generalize about a class of people but the racists aren’t coming to see your anti-racism play. As a playwright, I never put forth myself as being superior to the characters or the audience or anybody else. In fact, if anything people assume I’m a bad guy because I don’t moralize. They just assume I’m a bad guy!

5W: So what should playwrights be doing?

DH: Art is really good at probing the things we have trouble talking about or can’t even verbalize. Who were the Nazis? They were me and you. They were people. There’s no genetic difference. There is not even a big cultural difference. They were just westerners living at a high a level of civilization. So what is it then that caused these people to do this crazy shit? Well, I don’t have the answer to that, but art can probe and poke at the inner stuff that motivates crazy behavior. We don’t need to moralize, we need to expose it. If it’s just sloganeering what’s the difference between that and soviet propaganda or Maoist propaganda art? We know we should treat gay people with respect and Alzheimer’s patients with dignity—we don’t need to be told to do that—we need to figure out why we don’t do it. Let’s probe that. Write a play about a guy who is sympathetic but he treats his Alzheimer’s mother badly. And you feel for him. Now you might have some insight to take away. Maybe. Nothing is a bad subject or the wrong subject for art. It’s just the simplicity of what they’re doing now that’s bad.

5W: What are you working on now?

DH: I started to think maybe I should write a short screenplay for Julio Maria Martino because he was talking about wanting to direct something. We came up with an idea of a movie taking place in a confined space, which is what I liked. The thing I like about theater is that it’s limited and I find those restrictions liberating. I like the challenge of a confined setup. It forces you to think more creatively.

5W: And what you came up with a series of vignettes all taking place in a hotel room.

DH: It’s called Country of Hotels. My challenge was what can you do in a hotel room? Well, you have a light. A light can flicker. You have a sink. A sink can drip. There’s a peephole and the peephole has become a prominent feature in the movie. You can hear people in the next room having sex, whatever. I didn’t really find this constricting. I found it exciting. The last thing I ever expected after all these years writing plays, was to find myself on a movie set with 25 people running around and a director yelling at everybody. We shot it in Essex, England in about three and a half weeks. The shooting schedule was very tight, but we got it done and it’s being edited right now.

5W: So you really are always collaborating—directors and actors and other writers. A prodigious collaborator.

DH: I think that’s accurate. I do like to work with people. It has its problems but it’s worth it if you can be with good people.

5W: And you’re collaborating again, now that you’ve gone back to the visual arts.

DH: A totally unexpected development to my career. I developed this eye problem and I harbored hopes of someday getting back into visual arts—the truth is I resigned myself to never getting back to it. Then about two and a half years ago I asked a friend of mine to help me get a website up, which is still not done yet. We were going to focus on my plays but there’s not that much visually. I had these old photographs that were experimental in nature. They were manipulated images, long before digital. I thought some of them were good so maybe we can scan them and clean them up and put them on there. And I’ve got this archive of thousands of images I never even printed. I thought maybe with Photoshop we might be able to print them—because in the old days in darkrooms you didn’t have the controls you have now. So he scanned like 6,000 images and since then I’ve hired him to be my Photoshop guru. He made contact sheets and we discuss them and then he does the eye straining work while I go in the corner in listen to music. He’ll call me over and say, what do you think of this. And I’ll say, it’s too red or I think we should move this here and change this. Very unexpectedly using Photoshop tools to distort the imagery in ways I never imagined we’ve made 400 pictures in just a couple of years.

5W: And you’ve started exhibiting them.

DH: Every third Friday the Zhou B Art Center opens to the public and they’ve been displaying my work at one of the galleries. People come and it’s been great.

5W: Been moving units?

DH: A little. Some. Look, I said this before but it bears repeating. When I wake up in the morning all that matters is what I think about what I’m doing. But it’s only important to me. It’s nice if people connect with it. That’s certainly better. But I’m really excited by it. So much so sometimes I can’t sleep. I felt the same way when I was writing plays.

5W: That’s interesting because you said before you started the first art class you were so excited you couldn’t sleep. Here you are again up nights.

DH: Good point. I’ve had problems with insomnia my whole career.

5W: If you’d gone into accountancy you’d be better rested.

DH: I sleep a lot better when I’m depressed.

5wed: My mother interviewed you for the Tribune Magazine like 20 years ago.

ST: What was her name?

5wed: Norma Libman, but you won’t remember. I think it was about first jobs.

ST: Well I had some colorful ones. I worked in a fire extinguisher factory. I worked as a mailman.

5wed: She said she got stuck in the John Hancock building elevator and you told her that happened all the time.

ST: Must have been the Sears Tower. Right. When it happens that’s not fun. Usually when the elevators stop working it drops for awhile before the breaks go on. About ten floors a second before it comes to a stop.

5wed: You still have an office there?

ST: I do. It’s my law office.

5Wed: When I was walking downtown I overheard someone say, “I was going over your case and...” And I noticed I leaned in to listen. What is it about the idea of “a case” that’s so irresistible?

ST: If you go back to the notion of storytelling in general there has always got to be a conflict. A legal case involves people who are having a pretty serious disagreement with each other. If it’s criminal obviously then somebody’s liberty is at stake, but even if it’s just a routine civil case where people are suing one another for money or a divorce—in which case it’s about love and it’s really gory and emotional--it’s the stuff that elevates itself above the quotidian. A case is literally what people are willing to fight about, and that makes it interesting.

5wed: Did you come to writing through your law practice or was it the other way around?

ST: My dream was to be a novelist. I was a writing fellow at Stanford for two years and then I taught in the creative writing center there for another three, then I realized I was heading for a life as an English professor and it just wasn’t what I wanted to do. I started casting about for something else and I was shocked when I realized how interested I’d become in the law. I like to joke that my father was a prophet in his own time in that he was a physician who hated lawyers long before it was common for doctors to do that. I didn’t know any lawyers because he wouldn’t let them in the house. When my friends started to become lawyers I was shocked by how interesting it was what lawyers did. Eventually I accommodated myself to the notion that I actually wanted to become a lawyer.

5Wed: So the law was always something you were going to write about.

ST: I had written a novel, one of my umpteenth unpublished novels, about a rent strike on the north side of Chicago. The heart of the plot was something called, “the implied warranty of habitability.” Which I thought was fascinating but I didn’t realize until 23 publishers didn’t publish it that it was peculiarly fascinating to me.

5wed: That’s an actual legal concept?

ST: Yeah! Oh yeah. It’s really the backbone of contemporary tenant law. For eons the common law whether in the US—or before that the UK—clung to a fiction that a tenant was simply renting the right to occupy the space below the building. Even if you lived in the 7th floor apartment, that was the fiction. Then in the 1960s the courts in the US began to imply in the standard landlord/tenant contract an implied warranty, an implied promise, a covenant that the place you rented was going to be fit to live in. It changed everything. The fact that the pipes leaked and the heat didn’t work—now you had a remedy for it in court because the landlord was violating the implied warranty of habitability, and that’s where housing courts came from. None of that existed before the 1960s, and the fact that law could rectify what was really a century old injustice was fascinating to me. And in the process it could so dramatically equalize power relationships so that tenants could go from the equivalent of serfs to people who have some rights. I really became fascinated by this, but like I said, no one else did.

5Wed: You’re from Chicago.

ST: I grew up in west Roger’s Park then my parents moved when I was in high school to Winnetka which was a culture shock, and an unhappy one for me. I walked out of New Trier vowing that I would never set foot in the place again and then sent three kids there.

5Wed: Do you consider yourself a Chicago writer? And what does that mean to you?

ST: I certainly consider myself a Chicago writer. I used to joke in California that all of my dreams were set in Chicago, but I think it’s really true. My great attachment to Chicago writers was always to Saul Bellow. I didn’t appreciate as a young person what that was about. I did an essay for the Atlantic years ago about my very peculiar relationship with Bellow, which really was a proxy for my relationship with my father. Bellow was a high school classmate of my dad’s and somehow I never allowed myself to think about that while both men were alive. Somehow when I started reading Bellow I blocked out any connection between the two men. I read Bellow obsessively as a way to come to terms with my father even though Bellow was a lot of things that my dad was not. Including self-consciously intellectual.

5Wed: Which of Bellow books had the most meaning for you?

ST: For peculiar reasons, Herzog, but everything from Augie March on I have a great fondness for. In Augie March he really sounds like my dad talking so I should have appreciated it more.

5wed: What other writers were meaningful to you?

ST: The writer who influenced me in the most unconscious way was Dickens. I read Dickens so much throughout the time growing up culminating in a graduate school course in Dickens. I was never all impressed with Dickens as a young person and yet his way of doing stuff is sort of the grid I accept for the structure of a novel. And Graham Greene—when I got older and began to think about how you write novels that are serious but also gripping. As much as I love writers like Dreiser and Bellow and even my own teacher Wally Stegner, I knew there was a stasis in that work that was not satisfactory to a lot of readers including me. But Bellow I just studied like it was scripture, trying to figure out how each paragraph worked, how each sentence was written, the incredible control he had over a variety of different vocabularies and dictions. The language is amazing. You know Bob Stone died?

5wed: Yes, recently.

ST: About a month and a half ago. And he was another of the Stanford writing fellows before my time. But when he died—this is one of those things that could only happen by E-mail—those of us who were at Stanford in those years and who are still alive, gulp, sort of wrote an unconscious tribute to Stone. We all talked about the impact he had had, especially his first couple of novels. We all read Hall of Mirrors because it came out when we were at Stanford and we knew he had been there too and had enormous admiration for him a novelist. I’m not sure he ever fully got his arms around his material and every book ends in an apocalypse. But boy, what a great writer. My point is to say a lot of work has a lot of influence especially when you’re young. So it would be wrong to leave Bob Stone off that list.

5Wed: Was your dad a reader?

ST: As far as I recall, not much. My mom was a big reader. I certainly don’t remember him reading novels. He read The Longest Day, you know.

5Wed: Was he around for your literary success?

ST: Yes. He was around for Presumed Innocent and quite a bit beyond that. Certainly after a lot of other people read Presumed Innocent he did too and I asked him, “Dad what did you think?” And he looked at me and said, “I still think you could have gone to medical school.” Both my parents wanted that. I don’t see that very generously. My mom’s perspective was that it was a good living. My father wanted the affirmation that would come from having his son follow in his footsteps. I have never cottoned much to that style of parenting, that your children are here on earth to make you feel better.

5Wed: On the subject of Presumed Innocent, I wanted to tell you, I don’t remember reading a lot of the books I’ve read, I mean the physical act of reading them, but I can still recall 25 years later reading those scenes where Rusty goes and washes off that bloody tool. I can recall the room I was in and the couch I was sitting on and being sprawled out across the cushions, so obviously I was more than casually interested in going back and finding out what’s gone on in that world since then. But why did you want go back?

TS: Without being too specific, I was at a point in my life where I had gone through a lot of changes and I think it was important to me to go back to the source—I had always said I would never write a sequel.

5wed: So let’s start there. Why that original decision to never do a sequel?

ST: It just seemed to me like a trap. You can’t step in the same stream twice.

5wed: But you’ve set other books in the same place.

ST: Kindle is the setting for all the novels in whole or in part.

5Wed: Which is actually Chicago?

ST: It certainly looks a lot like Chicago. It’s a little bit smaller.

5Wed: It’s probably uncool of me to ask that but I have a long standing bet with a friend of mine who swears Kindle is based on the Quad Cities.

ST: No, but that’s certainly a reasonable interpretation except for the size.

5Wed: It has the river.

ST: Instead of the lake, right. I started out writing Presumed Innocent with Boston in mind, and I took so damn long to finish because I was working as an assistant U.S. Attorney in those years that eventually the city I was writing about became more and more like Chicago. I don’t keep a journal so the stuff that’s striking to me I sort of end up pumping into the fiction. The city became more and more like Chicago and I had to just name it.

5Wed: And the word Kindle sort of suggests smoldering just beneath the surface; corruption.

ST: Right. And low light and all the rest of it. [In 2006] I was writing what became Limitations and I had never written anything on command before, but the New York Times started publishing serial novels. So I did that and in the midst of writing Limitations I had a sentence that said, “A man is sitting on a bed in which the dead body of a woman lies.”

5wed: Which is the first line of Innocent.

ST: Yes. It was just this post-it note and one of the weird things about it is the image I had came from a Hopper painting called An Education in Philosophy. A guy in an ascot of all things is sitting on the edge of a bed, a woman is naked behind him. To me it always looked like they had sex and it had not broken through the isolation of existence. At least not for him. The post-it note was there for months and then I just said one morning, that guy is Rusty Sabitch. So who’s the dead woman? I guess it seemed like literary justice, since Barbara didn’t get her just desserts at the end of Presumed Innocent, that she ought to be dead now. The death penalty was finally exacted by the author. But then what is he doing in bed with Barbara? So I went back and reread the end of Presumed Innocent and I realized he was basically reconciling himself to live with this woman by the end of the book. Which was really amusing because people like Michiko Kakutani said This is just ridiculous. It begins with the implausible--that they would continue to live together. I was like, well whether you like it or not I was kind of stuck with it from the first book, but to me it’s more than emblematic of what can happen in a bad marriage—that inertia takes people over and they just learn to accept.

5wed: You certainly spill some ink explaining how it happened and how they got to that point.

ST: Sure. And anyway, at that point I was off to the races. I don’t know if any writer’s vow not write something can withstand a really good idea anyhow.

5wed: The vow itself is acknowledging there’s an idea worth perusing.

ST: Right, that something powerful is there. But you know, as a younger guy I didn’t want to become pigeonholed as the writer of the Rusty Sabitch series. I thought it was very unlikely I would be able to put lightening in a bottle again right after Presumed Innocent that would be regarded well. It would have sold well but it’s inevitable that people will say it’s not as good. It’s almost a way of preserving the value of the first book. If I were to have written a book about Rusty Sabitch that began right after Presumed Innocent that began with him trying to resurrect his life and getting involved in some other problem, it’s the same character, so how much a revelation can it be to a reader? I know what a pleasure it is to deal with a character you really like, and there are a lot of really fine writers who have written book after book about the same character, but to my mind no experience quite rivals the first time you meet that character.

5wed: Plus the space, the time between the two stories is such an important part of the texture of the second book. You could not have written this book two years later.

ST: I could not have.

5wed: And you probably had kids growing up in that period and I’m guessing that’s where Randy’s son comes from.

ST: Yep. The wages of being a parent.

5wed: In a book of first person narratives you managed a sharp difference between Rusty’s stiff diction and much looser way the younger people speak. How are you able to create that? Are you play-acting as you write?

ST: I hear it in my head. I couldn’t imagine that Rusty at 60 would sound the same as Rusty at 40. He has made a lot of compromises by the time of Innocent. I’m a big fan of the Rabbit novels and some of the way the walls close in on Rabbit had some influence on me.

5Wed: Why keep Tommy Molto in the 3rd person?

ST: Structurally it’s a little impure. I wasn’t confident that Tommy was articulate on his own to sustain the first person. I don’t envision him even in his new improved self as bookish or literate or literary. It would be a neat trick and if I felt I could do it would have been fine. It’s always amazing to me what Steven King can get out of a [character with] middle range vocabulary and intelligence. And he’s doing it deliberately.

5Wed: Why did you include the timelines to start each chapter?

ST: In my head it was really clear. I had a fight with my editor who did not want the timelines included. You would have thought it would be the other way around. My editor thought, you know, you’re talking down to the reader by doing this. I’m like, I’m just trying to give the poor reader a chance. This thing’s bouncing around in time. I just thought it was a good idea: anything that allows the reader to enter the imagined world—especially if it doesn’t involve other kinds of compromises such as making it simpler than you think it should be.

5Wed: Are you writing mysteries or legal thrillers?

ST: I’m writing what I can write. A lot of it is just natural to who I am. When I was an assistant U.S. Attorney and I would describe to my supervisors a case that I was about to indict, they would sit and listen for ten minutes and then say, why do you overcomplicate everything? Can’t you see this in its simplest terms? And the answer is, no I can’t. It’s not who I am. I see all the complexities and the back and forth. I’ve always liked surprises. The novel I wrote about implied warranty of habitability had a huge surprise at the end of it. I think in retrospect you would describe it as a kind of mystery. I always wrote about crime. To me the part about the mystery that’s artificial is that it explains with a level of certainty what would be otherwise unknowable, which is why and exactly how somebody did something bad. The truth of course is that all literature functions on the convention that people’s motives are knowable and explicable. That indeed is what literature does, but mystery novels do admittedly take that to a different level. All novelists need to be able to square the circle, need to tell a coherent story. They still have to know what the ending is. I don’t know why I was just thinking about this. Have you read the Goldfinch by Donna Tartt? It’s about this painting which actually sits in the Hague, ironically about three feet away from Girl With Pearl Earring by Vermeer. It’s quite a literary little room there. It develops that something has happened with this painting that this boy schlepped around for decades and she had to know that. She couldn’t have just thrown it in. And it turns into, by the end, quite an adventure yarn. One of the things that amused me is that [the book] is not talked about that way. It’s a little bit of a thriller: Russian mobsters and car chases and all of that. Yet no one puts the genre label on it, nor would they properly because if it were a genre book using the same subject we would have cut to the chase--literally. My only point is that the forms are related to each other. There’s no strict cleavage that people like to imagine so that the mysteries are here and the romances are there.

5wed: Do you find the label useful at all? Just annoying?

ST: As a writer I don’t like it as a way of dismissing me. People all the time, especially other writers will say, oh I didn’t realize until I met you that you were actually a pretty good writer. You know, because they’re mysteries. I don’t read that shit. But you want to know about a label that will cause most people not to read you? How about serious literary novelist. That’s death. Death!

5Wed: I wanted to ask you about schedule. You’re probably one of the busier writers around in terms of your second job. Is writing the second job?

TS: I think of writing as my first job these days. I try to save the morning for writing. I figured out about a year ago I’ve really never written more than 45 minutes out of every hour. E-mail was invented just for me. It gives me something to do those other 15 minutes without having to get out of the chair.

5Wed: Do you listen to music when working?

ST: No, I’m writing.

5Wed: So you’re able to be very focused during your 45 minutes of the hour.

TS: Yes. It’s a real pleasure to be in what my son likes to call a flow state, or deep play. To be so imaginatively engaged. If you watched a four or five year old playing with blocks or little [toy] people, that’s really what I’m doing. That’s what a lot of writers are doing. They’ve kept alive that part of themselves when they were four, five, six years old. I always say my life is a process of going upstairs and playing with my imaginary friends.

5wed: You can just turn that on and off.

ST: As a young person one of the things very candidly that drove me to law school was that I had a very hard time turning it off. I refer to that as the writer’s disease. I love Steve King personally, he is just a wonderful human being, but I think he suffers from the writer’s disease in that he finds it hard to turn it off. I think Joyce Oates when she was younger suffered from the same thing. Knowing both of them, Steve better than Joyce, but knowing both of them relatively well, they’re both geniuses, they’re amazingly smart. There is a lot going on in their heads anyway. But the story about Joyce, the famous one about her is when she won the national book award for Them she continued writing throughout the press conference she gave.

5wed: Do you prefer to write long hand or type?

TS: I was taught as a junior in high school in journalism class to compose at the typewriter. During the years when I was writing Presumed Innocent on the morning commuter train I was writing in long hand, but I owned the first laptop computer which was by Panasonic and it was big, probably six and a half pounds. People would stare at me on trains.

5wed: Do you do a lot of social media?

TS: I don’t even get that. Yes I do a tiny bit of that but I don’t follow Twitter. I don’t follow Facebook.

5wed: Is there not pressure from your people to have a social media presence?

TS: Yeah, basically. But like a lot of people I have other people do it for me. I was so happy when I got my 5,000th friend on Facebook because you’re not allowed to take any more. That was great because I could ignore all those friend requests.

5wed: So no trouble working out first drafts on computer?

ST: No. None.

5Wed: Can you talk about what you’re currently working on?

ST: The book I’m writing now is about an American prosecutor who goes to the national criminal court at the Hague and he’s been recruited for this position because of all kinds of diplomatic entanglements. They want him to investigate a massacre of Roma that took place 11 years before in a small town in Bosnia. The sensitive part of it is that the area was controlled by US troops under NATO command. Did the Americans actually kill those 1200 Gypsies? That’s the question. So do I feel obliged to answer that question? Of course.

5Wed: Is this based on a real incident?

ST: No. Made it all up. Though there’s at least one part of the plot I thought I was making up but it turns out [to be true]—I mean I just can’t believe that I had read this and then forgotten it—but it has to do with stolen armaments. It’s jaw dropping and it’s true. It’ll be a great author’s note.

5wed: Do you prefer the invention of first drafts or would you rather be revising?

ST: I definitely like the period when I’m just flying free. I don’t write sequentially. What I’m doing now is taking the many fragments that I’ve written last year and tearing them out of these different files and putting them in order in the book. That in turn will lead to another process of free association that will probably go on a couple more months. Basically filling in the blanks. I like all of that, before I have to get down to the ultimate discipline of having to get all of these different passages together. The problem with what comes in between is that you weren’t inspired to write it in the first place so it’s almost by definition going to be a little more drudge-like. Very often once you get into it you can feel really inspired. But I don’t approach the stage I’m about to enter--putting everything in line and sewing it all together--with the same sort of sense of play that I have earlier on. And then when I get on to rewriting? That’s just drudgery as far as I’m concerned. That’s work.

5wed: How much discovery and change happens as you go draft to draft?

ST: A lot. But look, it’s always easiest to talk about what I’m doing currently because I have it fresh in mind.

5wed: You don’t mind? Some writers are superstitious about talking too much about what they’re working on.

ST: Some writers, yes. Well, if you had asked me a year ago I would have been far more reluctant. With this one there were two work points as I like to call them with this book. One, for reasons that I consider comprehensible, I’ve always been fascinated by the roll of the Romani people, which is the current politically correct way to talk about Gypsies. There were Roma communities in Chicago when I was growing up. My dad had Roma patients. My former father-in-law was in the hospital and while he was there so was the—I forgot the Romani term for big leader. People call him the Gypsy king. So people were literally camped out in the waiting room. This was at Rush and the nurses were going nuts because people’s watches were disappearing. So I was like, who the hell are these people anyway? Which is a pretty fascinating question [with an] amazing answer. To some extent they’re the ultimate minority group in Western life: both unbelievably abused and persecuted, and yet they do a lot to bring it on themselves. It’s fascinating. They do not want to be integrated, which is what I mean by ‘bring it on themselves.’ Deeply spiritual. I’m researching the hell out of it—been reading on it for years. So that was one thing, and the other was the national criminal court where I had been at the Hague on book tour. The US ambassador at the time was nice enough to throw a little reception for me and naturally she invited a number of American lawyers over and they were all at that time working at the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague, which was concerned with the former Yugoslavia. They were all like, man you really need to write a book about this place. And I thought wow, that would be interesting. I just decided a long time ago I was going to do this eventually. Now I’ve got the Roma, I want to write about the Roma, a massacre of the Romas because that’s the best way to get into a discussion about their horrible position. Bosnia and Serbs hated the Croats and the Muslims, and the Muslims hated the Bosnians and the Serbs, but everyone hated the Gypsies. That’s a universal. In some ways when you’re writing about Roma you’re writing about the whole notion of identity and minority status. I’m always writing about the limitations of the law. I began thinking about it and I was like, it’ll be easier for me to free-wheel if there’s an American in there because this is incredibly complicated stuff. It just starts to come together. Okay, there has to be a massacre of the Roma and that would be investigated at the international criminal court. If you kill 1,200 people that rises to the level of a crime against humanity. It’s much more provocative if it’s done by the US military because, you know, the US refused to sign what’s called the Rome treaty, not to make things too complicated. We’re not signatories to that so it brings that smirk, that smile to a crime novelist to think of Americans being investigated by a court whose authority they don’t recognize. And that’s the way things begin to accrete. If that’s what I want to do then there’s only one place that could have happened and that would be in the former Bosnia, which as it turns out is a wonderful site anyhow, to think that fifty years after Hitler they were doing it again in Europe. It’s just staggering.

5wed: So this will end up being very political.

ST: Yeah, but in a small P sense. It feels like I’m in control of this. It’s about identity and the role of law in dealing with massive wrongs.

5wed: Do you write on contract? Is the manuscript already sold ahead of time?

ST: Years ago I refused to accept deadlines because I didn’t know what was going to happen at my law practice. As I’ve practiced law less and less as the years go on—mostly because it’s been there and done that—I’m willing to accept the discipline. I’m 65 and conscious of the fact that I don’t have all that much time left and I’m glad for someone to give me a deadline. But I’m very happy to be writing this book. I know I’ve given myself a big subject and I feel like I’ve got control of it for whatever reason. Making it comprehensible to anyone but me—it may be the implied warranty of habitability all over again.

5wed: You said control twice. What do you mean by that?

ST: As a younger person I had that feeling all the time.

5wed: That the material is too big and you won’t be able to, what? Contain it all, wrestle it in?

ST: Plot frankly is important because story makes coherent sense of the random materials of life. That’s what we always do when we tell stories. We impose order. It’s a cause and effect that we happen to believe in. If you can’t figure out the story you can’t figure out how things tie together. So what I’m saying is I know the story, I like the story, including some pretty unorthodox elements. And I’m confident I can write it and handle the book. If it’s a big, incomprehensible mish-mosh, well then that’s what second, third and fourth drafts are for: to figure out what you need to strip out of it. It’s a lot of stuff. It’s a different legal system. It’s a people that most Americans certainly know next to nothing about. You start out with a character who is basically in the reader’s position, who says, I chose to be a stranger in a strange land.

5wed: How do you know when it’s done?

ST: When I’ve got a draft I’m really happy with, the people closest to me will start reading it. Adriane will read it. My agent will read it. My editor edits, as does my agent, Gale. Sometimes my daughter will read. They will give me feedback too. My son has never been part of that process but my daughters will weigh in.

5wed: How radically different is the last draft that gets published from that first draft?

ST: Pretty significant—I usually end up with four separate drafts from the time it’s a sewn together book to the thing that gets published. Sometimes it’s just compression, jettisoning scenes. A lot of the rewriting is just making it shorter. There’s pride that you made it better. The feeling like you’ve made the book better comes during this process.

5Wed: What’s a good day writing versus a bad day?

ST: A bad day—being interrupted is bad. Monday was a bad day. I was constantly interrupted. What I was doing wasn’t good. Lots of outside interruptions.

5wed: You still do the band?

TS: Yes! We’re playing next week in Tucson.

5Wed: Who are the permanent members? Or does it always rotate?

ST: Sort of. There ain’t no band without Dave. Dave Barry. And Ridley Pearson. There’s kind of a core group, Mitch Albom, Amy Tan, Greg Iles, me for what little I contribute. People rotate in and out. Mary Carr is going to be there for the second time and then James McBride and Matt Groening sometimes. We don’t generally get Matt unless we’re in L.A. He’s incredibly busy with all these shows on the air.

5wed: The performances are mostly benefits?

ST: They’re all benefits.