Sam Lipsyte is the author of Venus Drive, The Subject Steve, and Home Land, winner of the Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The Quarterly, Harper’s, Noon, Open City, N+1, Fence, Tin House and Playboy, among other places. His newest book is The Ask, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He teaches at Columbia University in New York City. Sam will be on book tour with The Ask this spring.

Michael Kimball: I love Home Land, which came out in 2005 in the US, and what I want to know is why did you make me (and everybody else) wait five years for another book?

Sam Lipsyte: I guess the easy answer is, “Kids!” But also it took me a while to get onto the next thing after Home Land. You mourn the passing of your last book, and then you have to figure out what it is you write now. But thanks for waiting. I appreciate that.

Kimball: I like the use of the exclamation mark, and I had to ask, in part, because there are some surface elements in The Ask that overlap with your life—a university job, a marriage, a child, living in Queens. Is there anything that you’d like to say about that and how those pieces of your life informed the fiction?

Lipsyte: Well, I try to keep the autobiographical elements emotional as opposed to factual as much as I can, but certainly some things leak through. The narrator of The Ask does work at a university, but not at the teaching end. The truth is I don’t know much about his professional world. I had to make it up. I was following the dictum of writing what you don’t know. Similar things happened with the other elements you mentioned, although I do know what it is like to be married and a father in Astoria, Queens. But very different people rise up out of the sentences than the ones in your life.

Kimball: I like that idea—keeping the autobiographical elements emotional, a kind of method writing. So how did you get going on The Ask and where did you start—with a bit of emotion, a sentence, a character, something else?

Lipsyte: I started about five years ago writing about a similar character. I tried it a few different ways. It was third person for a while. It was multi-voiced. I gave my wife a few hundred pages a couple of years ago. It sat on her bedside table for a while, mostly unread, and then she read the whole thing and told me it sucked.

I started again. But a big turning point was when I figured out what he did for a living. And that came from hearing somebody use the word “ask” in the certain manner characters use it in the book.

Kimball: I’ve never had my wife tell me my writing sucked, for which I’m grateful. What was that like?

Lipsyte: It sucked. It was very awkward for her. And I was probably a baby about it. She didn’t want to hurt my feelings. But she didn’t want me to waste my time or embarrass myself, or her, I presume. Everybody writes shit sometimes. I guess some writers publish that stuff, and even get a movie made based on it, but usually we recognize we’ve taken a wrong turn and revise. I hope I would have figured it out myself eventually. But she saved me some months.

Kimball: There is a kind of difficult kindness in doing something like that. I’m curious: What did you gain changing the narration from third to first?

Lipsyte: I think I just got back to some particular calibrations that made the thing work. I was straining a bit. Most people write better in one or the other. I’ve written a few pieces in third but mostly I write in first. Various personas, but usually first person. Both are lateral movements that create necessary distance, but in different ways.

Kimball: What were those particular calibrations that made it work in first person? And what was the necessary distance created (or what was it created in relation to)?

Lipsyte: I suppose I’m talking about how a first person narrator is both presenting and reacting inside of a situation. I thought that dynamic would work best for this story. The main character might get crushed or elated, or even transported, but there is no third party describing it, at least officially. Milo’s voice must deliver these experiences, at the risk of Milo enduring the intensities all over again.

As to the question of distance, there is obvious distance created from the story or object when you write “she” or “he” instead of “I,” but finding in language a distinct “I,” a style of speech for the narrator, is also an effective way to establish enough space, or breathing room, to get at some of the autobiographical stuff you mentioned before. It changes things enough, bends and frays the connections to the facts enough, that you feel emboldened to invent, distort, etc. It’s fiction after all, but when some of the material is close to me, a little movement like that will free me from decorum. You’ve got to be brutal, and most of all with yourself. It helps to approach each project as a potential murder-suicide.

Kimball: We’ve always agreed on the brutality with which a writer must approach his or her work. OK, you said the big turning point in writing The Ask was when you figured out that the narrator worked as a development officer. What changed when you figured that out?

Lipsyte: Stanley Elkin said he had to know a character’s job before he could really begin. It wasn’t exactly like that for me, but it did make a lot of things fall together. It set up a lot of the problems. It gave the book motion. Also, I began to understand what kinds of notions the novel was churning up, not that I ever really know the whole of it, but I recognized certain patterns in the book, mostly connected to this idea of the ask, the panic and anxiety attendant, all the formalized and sometimes disguised begging we do in our work life and our relationships. Stability is gone, security has been hollowed out, which makes us depend on certain kinds of largesse more and more. At least that’s the experience of many people I know, and many of the characters in the book.

Kimball: The idea of the ask is one of the great things about The Ask. It begins as this material thing, something that the development office at this university does and then it leaks into every part of every exchange. It becomes funny, visceral, heartbreaking. It becomes a great way to get at the issue of the human condition. I know that I haven’t asked a question there, but maybe you could just respond with something funny or visceral or anything at all.

Lipsyte: Thanks. I think you stated it better than I could. There is something about the word visceral that is so visceral, no? Yet funny is not a very funny word.

Kimball: Let’s go back to your wife. What did she say after she read the final version of The Ask?

Lipsyte: “Better.”

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, is now in paperback in the US, UK, and Canada. The Believer calls it “a curatorial masterpiece.” Time Out New York calls the writing “stunning.” And the Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” His first two novels are THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY (2000) and HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS (2005). His three novels have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, Open City, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)—and two documentary films, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).

Christopher Higgs curates the art website Bright Stupid Confetti. He is the author of the chapbook titled Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously (Publishing Genius, 2009). Other of his belletristic prose exists in past/present/future editions of many esteemed literary organs, including, but not limited to: AGNI, Conduit, Quarterly West, Salt Hill, Post Road, No Colony, and Action Yes. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in literature and critical theory at Florida State University, where his primary research involves theorizing a rhizomatic approach to understanding transnational and transhistorical avant-garde/experimental literature. The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney (Sator Press, 2010) is his first novel.

Michael Kimball: The issue of authorship needs to be addressed. When that first email announcement of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney went out, a few people emailed me asking if I were Marvin K. Mooney. I have used a bunch of pseudonyms over the years, but I am not Marvin K. Mooney (nor am I Christopher Higgs), and I’m pretty sure that you, Christopher Higgs, are Marvin K. Mooney. I’m basing this on the fact that Christopher Higgs claimed authorship of Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously (Publishing Genius) and the fact that I published a piece of yours called “Photo Album” about 8 years ago in Taint Magazine. So talk to me about the decision to strike “a novel” and “written by Christopher Higgs” on the first title page and then the inversion of the attribution – The Complete Works of Christopher Higgs” and “written by Marvin K. Mooney” – on the second title page.

Christopher Higgs: Authorship gave structure to this novel. Before Mooney: no glue, no breath, no raison d’être. Before Mooney, only a bunch of loose words. Some of those words seemed meaningfully contained—like the chapbook you mention, or even that short piece you published in Taint Magazine—but ultimately, they needed Mooney to reach their fullest capacity. This may seem paradoxical but Mooney is not me; I am not Mooney. As fingers type those words, the desire arises to put that pronoun in quotes: “I” am not Mooney; Mooney is not “me” – this may sound/look silly, but it underscores a salient point, namely that which Deleuze and Guattari sketch out in the introduction of A Thousand Plateaus: the notion of a univocal subject is completely fallacious. “I” am not singular; I am plural, I am many. (Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”) Mooney wants to erase Higgs as much as Higgs wants to take credit for what Mooney has made possible. So which is the author: the one who made the novel possible or the one who made the novel possible? Higgs is the former and Mooney is the latter.

Kimball: Let’s go back to the beginning of your answer: “Authorship gave structure to this novel.” The book begins with multiple title pages, then a conference paper, praise and critique from at least a dozen sources, quotes from other fiction writers and lit-crit theories, a section where Mooney seemingly argues with Higgs, drawings, then a new title page—“The Life & Opinions of Marvin K. Mooney, Gentleman”—that is a reference to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. That doesn’t even convey the full scope of what you do in those first 48 pages, but it is at that point, 48 pages in, that we get the first piece of Mooney’s writing that is identifiably his. Could you talk a bit more about the structure—that is, what it allows you to do?

Higgs: Mooney’s work actually begins on page three, with the strikeout of “a novel written by Christopher Higgs.” Despite the explicit claim on page fifty that “This is the first sentence in this novel,” Mooney’s work actually begins on page three – no, wait, strike that, Mooney’s work begins on the cover of the book–no, wait, strike that, Mooney’s work begins at the moment when you first heard or read about it, which is to say that there really isn’t a beginning, per se, or at least the whole idea of beginnings should come into question. Purposefully, the structure resists Aristotelian notions of unity, of demarcating a clear beginning, middle, and end. In place of those conventions, the novel plays with startings and stoppings, difference and repetition, discursivity and intertextuality, large and small openings, escapes, detours, tangents, deferments, digressions, obsessions, etc. Mooney’s work is a construction, an assemblage, it is porous, malleable, dynamic, active, and at the same time it is an object. This is important because objects don’t begin and end. If you were to consider a lunchbox, you would (presumably) not ask the question: where does this lunchbox begin and where does it end. Likewise, the novel.

Kimball: The reader doesn’t get story, in the common sense, until Page 55, though there is plenty happening. I don’t know if that makes sense. Anyway, this is a piece of fiction that has its own untraditional structure and was adapted from the piece in Taint, “Photo Album” (“Molly” becomes “Mooney”). What I’m wondering is if telling stories pisses you off, as it does Mooney?

Higgs: Haha. Yes. Stories, in literature, tend to bore the hell out of me, as a reader and a writer. For one thing, stories imply a teller who wants to tell someone something. As a writer, I’m not interested in telling anybody anything. I don’t go to literature for communication or entertainment or escape. I go to literature (as I do all art) for aesthetic gratification. This, as Kant reminds us, exists solely at the formal level. Content is beside the point. If I want a story I call my friend and ask him what he did over the weekend or else I watch a romantic comedy. Literature, for me, is about form and structure, the way stories are told rather than what is being told. I believe I acquired this approach back in my late teens/early twenties upon reading (completely by chance, as I recall) a mind-altering, paradigm-shifting, über-empowering book by Alain Robbe-Grillet entitled For A New Novel: Essays on Fiction (1963). One of the many things it taught me was this dirty secret: chances are, no one has ever nor ever will invent a story I have not already myself considered. (Take Joyce’s Ulysses, for example: a story about two dudes going about their day and in the end the wife of one of the dudes can’t fall asleep. That story is not very interesting, even if you throw in some seemingly provocative plot elements like having one of the dudes masturbate at the beach after eating a gorgonzola sandwich. It’s just not that interesting.) What is much more likely, and promises to be much more interesting, is that someone has invented or will invent a way of telling a story I have not considered. So that is what I desire, both as a reader and a writer. I want to read literature that has been produced in a way I have not read before, and I want to produce literature in a way that has not been produced before. That’s one of my goals, at least.

Kimball: OK, form and structure, I keep thinking about the Hawkes quote from Page 14: “The true enemies [of the novel are] plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking, totality of vision or structure [i]s really was that remain[s].” What would you (and also Mooney) say that the totality of the vision is in The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney?

Higgs: Paradox, maybe? The tension created by the paradox between multiple (seemingly incompatible) genres, between multiple (seemingly incompatible) voices, between chaos and cosmos, creation and destruction, open and closed systems, clarity and confusion, sense and nonsense, legibility and illegibility, communicability and incommunicability, desire and repulsion, want and need, etc. Mooney, I think, desperately wants attention, to be liked, to be esteemed, but at the same time he does everything he can to make it difficult to be liked and esteemed. He begs you to continue reading the book in one moment, when in the next moment he dares you to put it down. He needs validation while simultaneously dismissing the need for validation. He wants acclaim while simultaneously doing nothing to deserve it. So contradiction and consonance battle, rage, intensify, and, I think, create a kind of structure and vision. Maybe?

Kimball: Yeah, definitely, maybe. That’s what I liked all those various elements and how they fit (and don’t fit) together—including the interruption halfway through, the place to insert music, and the way the book ends, with encore. I’m curious about that. Tell me about the encore.

Higgs: Well, the quick (uninteresting) answer is: I’ve never seen an encore in a book before, so I had to do it. The longer (hopefully more interesting) answer is twofold: first, it is indicative of my desire to push formal boundaries, to really push them beyond what I’ve encountered in my readings—and I say that as someone passionately dedicated to the study of innovative literature. This novel is experimental. Purposefully, consciously. And I mean that in a very literal sense: one of the things I am trying to do is conduct an experiment to determine the legible boundaries of the novel as a form of artistic expression. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, this novel is an amalgam of seemingly disparate parts (”from the slaughterhouse and the dissecting table”) or more precisely, an amalgam of seemingly disparate forms: the encore you are more likely to find at the end of a Fleetwood Mac concert than the end of a novel, the hand-drawn self portraits, the mathematical equations, the biographical and faux biographical stuff, the historic and faux historic essays, the surrealist stories, the letters, diary entries, notes, quotes, etc., etc. It’s all there to create a purposefully exploded (yet somehow contained) form. As for the second part of the longer answer (sorry I’m so longwinded!) the encore is indicative of the specific inspiration from which I drew upon during the construction of the novel. The most significant, aside from my obsessive fascination with philosophy/critical theory, being the thirteen films made by Jean-Luc Godard between 1961-1967. Over the course of the three years I spent working on this novel, I studied those films intensely, taking from them (among many other things) the smash-cut editing technique, the vital potential of randomness and the non sequitur, the disharmonious juxtaposition of image and sound which I translated to literature as the disharmonious juxtaposition of emotion and information, and perhaps most importantly of all, the audacity to embrace singularity.

The Believer calls Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, “a curatorial masterpiece.” His three critically acclaimed novels are (or will soon be) translated into many languages. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, Open City, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard) and the documentaries, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).

Zachary German was born in southern New Jersey in 1988. In 2006, he dropped out of high school and moved to Philadelphia. He delivered pizza and other things on his bicycle, and later worked at a thrift store. In 2007, his story “letting me out first part” was selected by Dennis Cooper for inclusion in the Userlands anthology from Akashic Press, and an early excerpt from Eat When You Feel Sad was published as an e-book by Bear Parade. In 2008, he moved to Brooklyn, where he completed Eat When You Feel Sad (Melville House). He currently works as a dog walker in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Dennis Cooper says, “Zachary German’s nimble, catwalking, archeological, surface dwelling, emotionally unpaved prose is a thing of total wonder and my favorite drug, language-based or otherwise.  Eat When You Feel Sad is so bright and pleasurable and full of excellence, it’s positively serene.”

Michael Kimball: You signed my copy of Eat When You Feel Sad with a signature that I’m pretty envious of. Did you practice your autograph?

Zachary German: I did practice my autograph, on an envelope at Melville House when I first got copies of the book. I wrote it once, and when I looked at my signature, or maybe while I was writing it, I realized I really don’t like it and never will, probably, and decided to stop practicing and just let it be how it is. I think it looks dumb, really sloppy in a non-sexy way. I mean it. Sore spot.

Kimball: I still love it, even if you don’t, but I won’t ask anything else about it. Let’s switch topics. The action in the first paragraph of Eat When You Feel Sad takes places years before the rest of the book (and none of the rest of the book does). It’s a simple and beautiful way into the narrative and I’m wondering, besides that, what the thinking was there?

German: Initially I had just written a lot of scenes that could be in a person’s life, and not necessarily in order. Then when I started to try to make what I had written into a novel I arranged them chronologically. I didn’t really mean for the bulk of the book to take place in a few years in the character’s early twenties, it just happened that way. When I submitted it to my publisher, there was no “Years later,” — and it was just a scene which seems to involve a young child, a scene which maybe involves an adolescent, a scene with “young adult.” So the “Years later,” was the influence of Dennis Loy Johnson, which at first I doubted, but eventually I realized would be helpful and perhaps funny, and perhaps the other nice things you said about it in the question.

Kimball: Since we’re talking about parts of the book that changed, what other kinds of changes did you make as you made the Bear Parade ebook of Eat When You Feel Sad into the paperback Eat When You Feel Sad?

German: Oh so many things. I took out all “Robert feels happy” / “Robert feels sad” / “Robert feels [whatever]” completely. Took out “Robert hates himself,” etc. I changed all sentences like “Robert thinks about [something]” to sentences like “Robert thinks “[something].” I split up all compound sentences. I just tried to make all the narration very consistent, and to not try to do anything. In the Bear Parade version, there is a scene where the narration breaks into first person and becomes fairly “meta.” Editing, I realized I didn’t need that gimmick, and that it probably took away from what I was trying to do overall.

A big thing was just getting all the characters to make sense. Throughout, I would just write scenes I thought of, or maybe remembered, or something, and of course not always in order. So when I was compiling everything into one extended narrative I had to rearrange all the scenes in such a way that would make sense. Which is complicated because what might make sense to me, or be funny to me, might be confusing to the reader. So I had to think a lot about that. I made maps, kind of, of what page numbers different characters were on, and how Robert’s relationship to each of them was. I had done that to a very small scale when I was working on the draft for Bear Parade, but that was a many-hour process for the novel.

I feel like the Bear Parade book can function as a totally nondescript twenty-something American whatever, but for the novel, which takes place on a larger scale and of course just has more going on, it seemed like I should maybe try to make it a little more clear. The scenes from childhood, from the character visiting his hometown, I tried to make the relationships clear while still not using much narration, no “They had always had a tense relationship.”

Kimball: Why did you cut the “feels” sentences?

German: I tried to make Eat When You Feel Sad as realistic as possible — to make every sentence a fact. “Robert feels sad,” which was very heavily used in early drafts, is not a fact. The word “sad” is used in the novel, in thoughts and dialogue, but I refrained from using it, or words like it, in the prose, as I really don’t think it means anything.

“Robert says ‘That makes me feel sad.’” seems a lot different than “Robert feels sad.” One is a fact, from which you can see how a character might react to a situation, how he talks, how he uses the word “sad.” The other gives a very vague idea of a character’s emotional state. It really does nothing.

Kimball: And why did you cut “about” from sentences?

German: The “about” sentences were really just a consistency thing - “Robert thinks ‘Bill Murray.’” seems to go better with the style than “Robert think about Bill Murray.”

Kimball: Yes, much better, and why did you break the compound sentences?

German: I think when I was reading over the novel in the early drafts there were already a lot of simple sentences, and I was really enjoying them, and felt kind of annoyed when I would come to a compound sentence, like it interrupted something. Which could be helpful, sometimes, but for this book I just thought it would read better with all simple sentences.

Kimball: I like that Eat When You Feel Sad is mostly scenes, but I’m curious about why you kept the narration limited?

German: I think it just went with everything else about the novel. I don’t have anything against narration, giving a brief summary of a character’s experience before or during the action of the story, it just didn’t seem like something that would be consistent with the rest of the novel. I wanted each scene to just be a scene. Initially I had thought about doing something like what Mary Robinson did with Why Did I Ever, just having a lot of scenes about one character, that could be taken in any order. That desire eventually gave way to a more linear narrative, but I still wanted each scene to be able to work by itself, just as five minutes or an hour or five hours in time.

Kimball: A huge percentage of the book is made up of things that Robert (the main character) says, thinks, and does. A small percentage of the book is made up of things that other characters say and do. And an even smaller percentage of the book is made up of description of place and setting. Can you talk about that content emphasis (or lack of)?

German: The book is about one person, Robert. He’s not very social. He spends a lot of time on his own. So that’s why there’s so much of him, thinking and whatever. I didn’t really think about this at the time, but I think something I just ended up doing was giving relatively equal gravity to everything that happens to him in the course of the book. I don’t think there is more time spent on relationships than there is on masturbation, than there is on reading alone than there is on getting drunk at parties, etc.

As for description it just didn’t seem necessary to the style. I wanted it to be able to take place anywhere, and to me, descriptions of place just aren’t very interesting; I would always choose to read what someone is doing over what the sky looks like.

The Believer calls Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, “a curatorial masterpiece.” His three critically acclaimed novels are (or will soon be) translated into many languages. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, Open City, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard) and the documentaries, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).

Padgett Powell has taught writing at UF since 1984. He has published five novels and two collections of short stories–his latest, the novel The Interrogative Mood (Ecco) His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Paris Review, Grand Street, Esquire, The New York Times Book Review and Magazine, and Oxford American; and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Best American Sportswriting. The winner of the Prix de Rome and a Whiting Writers Award, he has also taught at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and currently teaches at the Summer Literary Seminars, St. Petersburg, Russia. The New York Times Book Review calls The Interrogative Mood “courageous and entertaining.” Sam Lipsyte calls it “[an] ingenious provocation … another brilliant work of fiction.”

Michael Kimball: I have a question about the first question mark in The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?, which is right there in the title. Is it really meant to question whether the book is a novel or is it more of an insistence that this book composed entirely of questions is in fact a novel or is it something else entirely?

Padgett Powell: That question mark is meant to diffuse the kind of irk that results, legitimately, when something that is arguably not a novel is called a novel. I was thinking specifically of Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? It chapped some ass when it was called a novel. I sought not to chap but to still classify the odd document as a novel. What with all the question marks to follow, it seemed like a natural move to let one leak onto the title page.

Kimball: It makes me think, too, of David Markson’s late quartet of novels, one of which is titled, This Is Not A Novel. But now I’m curious: Did you set out to write a novel composed only of questions or did it begin as something else? Also, how did you decide to classify The Interrogative Mood as a novel and did you ever consider classifying it something else?

Powell: It started and remained an answer to certain emails I was getting entirely in the interrogative mood. At no time did I plan a book, at no time did I submit it as a book to a book publisher. Calling a thing a novel helps it have a slim chance of someone’s buying it; it certainly could not be called anything else. Except, well, something like this (from fan mail):

Professor Powell,

Congratulations, your terrific book The Interrogative Mood will be an instant classic but in response to the ‘?’ it might not be a novel. It seems to me that it shows rather than tells issues raised by the philosophy/way of life of Pyrrhonism, in which the problem of the criterion leads to suspension of judgment and skepsis — always searching — which would make it a one-of-a-kind document in philosophy. Whatever it is? Thanks for writing it.

Kimball: If you weren’t planning on The Interrogative Mood being a book and it was never submitted as book, then how did all of those questions accumulate and how did it become a book?

Powell: I kept writing them, having nothing better to do after putting on my pants, depressed. I sent them to The Paris Review. An editor at The Paris Review bought some, quit PR, took a job at Ecco, and called me from there saying they were doing the book. I said, Okay.

Kimball: That is one of the best publication stories that I have ever heard. Also, there was something about the tone of The Interrogative Mood that I hadn’t quite figured out, something that I was fascinated with, something that allowed the narrator to ask questions about a huge range of subjects and also allowed all kinds of non sequiturs that I accepted without question — “depressed” makes that all make sense. Forgive the wind-up and here’s the question: Are you, Padgett Powell, also the narrator of The Interrogative Mood or is the narrator a fictional creation separate from you (or is the narrator maybe a fictional Padgett Powell)?

Powell: Dude, c’est moi. It’s always c’est moi. Narrator schmarrator, author schmauthor.

Kimball: OK, let’s go back to something else, the idea of originality. The Interrogative Mood is original, singular. That is what piqued my interest and that is why I kept reading. In fact, as I read deep into the novel, I began to see a double narrative at work. There was one novel, the narrator’s novel, which the reader begins to discern to some extent through the adjectival nature of the questions, the fact that the questions have been chosen to be the particular questions in The Interrogative Mood. The second novel is the reader’s novel, which the reader begins to create by answering the questions. I know there isn’t a question there, but I thought you might want to say something about that.

Powell: I like adjectival nature of the questions but confess I do not know what that means. There is always I suppose a second novel, the reader’s, who is imagining things privately and differently from the way the writer imagined them; in this case though we do have the specific theatre of the answers themselves, which the writer has not imagined for the reader, per se. That is not perhaps the exact correct usage of per se but don’t it look smart?

Kimball: That seems like a good place to end—with you asking a question.

The Believer calls Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, “a curatorial masterpiece.” His three critically acclaimed novels are (or will soon be) translated into many languages. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, Open City, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard) and the documentaries, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).

Samuel Ligon is the author of a collection of stories, Drift and Swerve (Autumn House, 2009), and a novel, Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins, 2003). His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, Post Road, Keyhole, Gulf Coast, New England Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Eastern Washington University and is the editor of Willow Springs. Here’s how Sam Coale has described Sam Ligon’s fiction: “It’s a brutal unmasking of any social pretensions whatsoever, a down-and-dirty language that describes sex and violence at its most primal and primitive level. His characters, imprisoned in marginal marriages and marginal lives, eat lots of doughnuts, smoke dope, get drunk, bicker and whine and reveal their self-destructive, self-doubt-ridden selves that always seem on the verge of total collapse.”

Michael Kimball: I read a story of yours called “Blueboy” back in 1988 that has always stuck with me and it was the first thing that I looked for when I opened Drift and Swerve, but you didn’t include it in the collection. So tell me: Why didn’t you include that story and/or what was the selection process for the stories that you chose to include?

Samuel Ligon: I’m shocked that you read that story, but it’s certainly nice to hear. That was my first published story, and I did look at it when considering the stories that would make up Drift and Swerve, but it was hard for me to recognize it as my own. The syntax felt off, or the rhythm felt wrong, when up against the other stories. And I’d written it so long ago that even the language felt like someone else’s. I still feel an attachment to that story because it was my first publication, and because, when it came out, my mother called on the phone and told me she thought I should seek counseling, because the story suggested that I was probably “psychotically obsessed with death,” a phrase I still like to repeat. And while I think the story could have fit thematically, with this sort of alienated protagonist on the move, embroiled in relationship problems, it didn’t seem to mesh with the other work. With the exception of explicitly linked collections, like Jesus’ Son or The Things They Carried, it can be hard to pinpoint unifying elements in a collection. Too many collections, it seems to me, just feel like assembled stories. And I didn’t want that. So it was a matter of feeling or intuiting which stories belonged together, based, I think, on tone and sound and gravity and “thematic” elements, too, which, in the case of Drift and Swerve, had to do with a kind of actual movement. Not all the stories in the collection have characters moving, but most of them do, and they also tend to examine characters in places where they don’t quite belong.

Kimball: So tell me, what has changed about your syntax and your language over the years?

Ligon: I hope my prose today is leaner, harder, with less fat in it. That story “Blueboy” starts with a list and continues to use lists throughout its first section, and while I like lists, the rhythm of these particular lists just feels off to my ear now. The first line reads, “The custodians, the collectors, the caretakers of the dead, they wore gray cotton jumpsuits and hard plastic helmets on their heads.” Okay, that’s all right. I don’t mind the unnecessary pronoun “they,” or the rhyme of “dead” and “heads.” But the second line can’t let go of that “they,” and, worse, is overwritten, a problem that plagues the entire story: “They carried shears and burlap sacks, and they carefully clipped the drying leaves from the trees, one by one, denying the wind its right to blow them away where they would clutter up the sidewalk, only to be swept up by some hunched up old woman who would inevitably elbow you on the bus later.” I cringe at the phrase regarding the wind being denied its rights. I use two adverbs in that sentence, “carefully,” and “inevitably,” which are probably only there for a rhythm that no longer sounds right to my ear. And that’s only the first two sentences. Language is inflated throughout the story, and there’s a kind of snottiness to the voice, too, in places, which would be fine if I were trying to show the snottiness of the narrator, but I don’t think I was aware of that smug tone. Not only do I use another adverb when my narrator describes his boss as an “insufficiently mustached Midwesterner,” but I follow it with a sort of winking pair of clichéd idioms—“who said I’d get my fair shake if I played ball with him”—as if attempting to bring the reader into a superior, smart person’s club in which we would never dare use such hackneyed descriptions. That feels cheap and flat and lazy to me now. There are still elements of that early story that I like, but it just doesn’t feel that closely related to what I’m doing now.

Kimball: I’m going to leave that alone then and go back to something else you mentioned, the thematic of characters moving. Where did that notion come from?

Ligon: I had not been aware that so many of my stories contained that blatantly obvious element. Four of the stories are linked by a character named Nikki, and she’s in a different town in every story, moving through a bunch of states on a bus in one. Each of those stories seems to be about her trying to escape. That’s the urgency that drives them. She’s always about to run, or is running. And she’s always fighting something, kicking and stealing and fucking and fighting. She’s got some deep hunger, some deep deficiency in her life. I remember talking with Robert Lopez about those stories, before I showed them to him, and he said, “What does she want?” And I thought, what does she want? She wants money or she wants revenge. She wants to get away from her mother. She wants to get away, period. She wants to escape and she wants to survive. But what does she really want? She wants to be loved, I thought, which seemed like such a trite, idiotic way to think of her. But the more I thought about it, the more true it seemed, even if it felt so bland and huge and obvious and applicable to nearly every lonely character in the world. I’m not sure that made much difference in the end, but what did matter to the stories was her urgency. Her need to move. Her lack of peace, maybe. I don’t know. I started looking at other stories I’d been working on, and noticed how many of them had a similar restlessness, or had actual movement in them. I can’t believe how many cars are in this collection, the characters sort of static or trapped in moving vehicles, in stories like “Orlando,” “Drift and Swerve,” and “Arson,” or trapped in places they don’t quite belong, in stories like “Vandals,” “Germans,” “Dirty Boots,” “Austin,” and “American League.” In other stories, like “Animal Hater” and “Cleavage,” hard transitions drop the characters from place to place to place, creating another kind of urgency. So I finally recognized that movement in all these stories. It seemed to suggest a kind of isolation. And hunger, too—to have some kind of human connection maybe? To find a place to belong? I don’t know. And though it didn’t occur to me until I thought about your question, it probably has to do with my own experience, moving from place to place to place all my life, never being from anywhere.

Kimball: Another element that runs through the collection is violence. One story that stands out for me in terms of violence is “Germans” and it seems as if it is Henry’s lack of understanding that drives the violence. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Ligon: That’s interesting—as if the violence is coming out of some hole or absence. In “Germans,” Henry seems to become aware of the horror of the Nazis’ violence, or seems to identify with it somehow, almost to embrace it, or maybe just to hold onto it as he recognizes it, because of that isolation I was talking about earlier. When I was growing up in the late 60s and early 70s, Vietnam was going on, and we were bombarded by images of that war. But the war we were obsessed with, as boys, was World War II—the Germans against the Americans, which was how we divided ourselves when we played at war. It’s stunning to me now, that though that war in Europe, with all its atrocities, seemed incredibly distant to us, we were only twenty to twenty-five years removed from it. There was a weekly documentary show on TV called The World at War, that was a sort of war porn show, like the Nazi networks on cable now. Every boy I knew watched it, all these eight year olds greedily acquiring the vocabulary—Stalingrad and Auschwitz and Rommel and Goering and Blitzkrieg and Battle of the Bulge and Battle of Britain. Like these weird touchstones. When I was a freshman in college, in spring of 1982, I got pneumonia, was sicker than I’ve ever been in my life, and right before I knew I was sick, before the fever spiked, I was watching a documentary about Vietnam at my parent’s house on the last day of spring break. For the first time in my life, I was struck by the horror of that war, or any war. The maiming, killing brutality of it felt real for a second. Like it wasn’t just TV. Like I’d gotten the slightest glimpse of it as a real phenomenon. I was eighteen years old and started crying—just bawling. Out of control. My mother came into the room and asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t articulate it. Somehow, for a brief moment, all the desensitization of my childhood consumption of war images and information fell away. Looking back on that, I think I felt complicit somehow in all that brutality. That was the feeling I wanted to give that little boy, Henry at the end of “Germans.” He’s just a kid, new in town, and he’s trying to find a way to belong in this new place. But he always has to be the Germans. His father won’t brag to Henry’s friends about his experiences in World War II, which seems like a betrayal. So, yeah, you’re right, he identifies with the Nazis out of a lack of understanding of the real horror of what they did, but also from another absence, I think—this hunger to belong. If they’re going to make him be the Germans, he’ll be the Germans. He’ll be the Nazis. But I think something happens to him at the end, some kind of realization of the horror of what the Nazis did and his sense of complicity in it, but also a feeling of the real isolation of being alive and sort of forever alone.

Kimball: That’s an amazing answer, so let’s try another violent story. I’m thinking of the lack of Hugh’s awareness in “Vandals” and how that makes the violence all the more menacing. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Ligon: Maybe Hugh in “Vandals” feels something similar to Henry, in terms of his isolation and hunger to belong. Hugh and his wife have left the suburbs and moved out beyond the exurbs to a house in the country. Kids vandalize his mailbox, egg his door, and for some reason he can’t leave it alone. He’s kind of like a kid in that way, playing war, building a kind of fort, acquiring weapons. What he wants most of all, probably, is to be left alone, as if he belongs in that place. But he makes the problem so much worse by not ignoring it, by sort of desperately trying to engage the “vandals” on their own terms. So he gets lost in that game and ends up killing them. He doesn’t necessarily mean to, but there seems to be an inertia at work—as if, once he’s decided to engage them on their terms, the only way it can play out is through violence. That’s the only language or means of engagement available to him. So he’s unaware of what he’s unleashing, of the likely consequences, but also just incompetent as a human, unable to transcend his idiotic need for retribution or his need to feel like he belongs.

Kimball: I’ve been trying to figure out how to bring this interview around, make it feel like a complete thing, so here’s what I have: We started with your first published story, “Blueboy,” and how your writing has changed since then. What I’m wondering about is how your writing will change after Drift and Swerve. What will change next in terms of your syntax and language?

Ligon: I’m in the middle of a multiple first-person novel right now, working with twenty or so characters, so the next thing will definitely not involve trying to weave that many different voices. I’m too close to that project to think much about how it’s working, but I’d like to try to get out of the way of the next thing I write. I reread Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life a couple years ago and was struck by how clean the prose was. I kept forgetting Wolff the writer was there at all, which was fascinating to me since the book is a memoir, about Wolff the boy. But that prose felt so clean and transparent. And maybe it’s because I’m working in the first person now that makes me want to write something with less emphasis on voice. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to think of it. I can’t remember who made the comment about prose being like a window, or exactly what was said, but I like that idea of making it invisible or unnoticeable, not smearing it up with anything that calls attention to itself. The reader needs to slip into a dream-like state through the writing, and it seems like clean, transparent prose can help facilitate that. I’m not sure how my use of syntax and language will change in the future, but I do know that I’d like to get out of the way of the writing as much as I can; I want to get rid of all my grubby fingerprints.

Michael Kimball’s novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, is out in the US, UK, and Canada (http://michael-kimball.com/). The Believer calls it “a curatorial masterpiece.” Time Out New York calls the writing “stunning.” And the Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” His first two novels are THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY (2000) and HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS (2005). His three novels have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, Open City, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)—and two documentary films, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).

Andrew Porter has received a variety of fellowships including a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener/Copernicus Foundation, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee’ Writers’ Conference, a Residency Fellowship from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Glenna Luschei Award. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Prairie Schooner, The Antioch Review, Story, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, among others. He has also had his work read on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” and selected as one of the 100 Distinguished Stories of 2007 by Best American Short Stories. Andrew Porter is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. THE THEORY OF LIGHT AND MATTER is his first book.

Michael Kimball: One of your cover blurbs is from Marilynn Robinson and she describes your voice as “universal … with transparency as its adornment.” I didn’t read that blurb until I had read the collection and I kept thinking of your sentences as incredibly clean, so what I’m wondering about is this: What are your considerations as you write each sentence?

Andrew Porter: To be honest, I don’t allow myself to think too much about individual sentences until I’m pretty far along in the revision process. This is partly because I tend to be a little obsessive when it comes to getting the prose to “sound” right, and if I started tinkering around with that stuff too early in the process, I’d probably lose sight of the actual story. That said, when I do get to that last stage of the process, I tend to take it pretty seriously and probably end up rewriting almost every single sentence in the story by the time I’m finished. As I said, I’m thinking a lot about sound at this point, but also about clarity. I’m looking for anything that might confuse the reader or disrupt the overall flow of the story, and many times this might involve rewriting an individual paragraph or an individual sentence five or six times.

Kimball: So let’s take the opening to “Departure” (which was the first thing I read, after opening the book at random, and I knew then that I was going to like the collection) and talk about that in terms of sound and clarity, especially any changes that you made in those terms (if you can recall them):

“That spring we were sixteen Tanner and I started dating the Amish girls out on the rural highway—sometimes two or three at the same time, because it wasn’t really dating. There was no way of getting serious.”

Porter: I wrote those sentences so long ago that it’s hard to remember what specific changes I might have made to them. What I do remember is that those two sentences weren’t the original first sentences of the story. They actually appeared in a longer paragraph later in the story, but at some point in the revision process, I remember reading over them and realizing that this is where the story should start. For one, there’s a certain urgency in the tone, but also a sense of nostalgia and a tinge of self-irony. In other words, I felt like those two sentences established the precise tone I was looking for in the revision process, and after I put them at the top of the first page, I was able to revise the rest of the story accordingly. In addition to the tone of the language, though, there’s also a certain rhythm in the writing itself, and I think that rhythm is ultimately what creates that sense of urgency. If you took out one of those clauses, or if you substituted a two-syllable word for one of the one-syllable words, you might change the entire feel of the paragraph. Finally, to address the issue of clarity, I think that clarity is especially important in an opening paragraph, and it’s something I think about a lot. In this paragraph, I think I wanted to raise certain questions, but I also wanted to firmly ground the reader in the setting of the story, the narrative time, and the context. Without those details, I think those two sentences would probably feel a little vague.

Kimball: That sense of nostalgia in the tone runs through “Departure”—and a bunch of other stories—in a beautiful and unsentimental way, and you set it up in a natural way, often using years or ages. That brings me to my next question. There’s a thing you did at the end of a few stories—“Departure,” “Connecticut,” maybe “River Dog”—where you give the age of the narrator, creating a kind of distance. Could you talk about that, what you are after with that device?

Porter: Well, I think a lot of the stories in the book are about memory and the way we reconstruct memory, and perhaps more specifically, the way our memories affect the way we present certain events in a story. So, when I do that type of thing—when I mention the narrator’s age now or when I draw attention to how many years have passed since the events of the story took place—it’s my way of reinforcing the fact that the story itself is simply an “attempt” on the part of the narrator to try to understand these events at a particular time in his or her life. In other words, if the narrator was telling this story, say, several months after the events of the story took place, the story itself might have a completely different feel than the same story being told twenty years later. I guess it’s a way of reminding the reader that the passage of time might be influencing the way the narrator is remembering these events and might even be influencing the accuracy of the story itself. And, of course, on a more basic level, it also reinforces the fact that these events have been weighing heavily on the narrator’s mind for some time.

Kimball: The reconstruction of memory and story is one of the most compelling things in these pieces. Even after finishing many of the stories, the reader is often left with a kind of mystery and that somehow makes the story all the more winning. We don’t know, for instance, exactly what happened to Carrie Huber in “River Dog.” We don’t know Colin’s thoughts about Heather’s relationship with Robert in “The Theory of Light and Matter.” And we don’t know what happens to the Amish girls in “Departure.” Of course, part of this mystery is created by the constraints of first-person narration, but could you talk a little more about using mystery to create tension in these narratives and how you decided to leave out what you left out?

Porter: I guess it kind of relates to what I was talking about in my previous answer. As a writer, I’m always trying to create certain questions in the reader’s mind about what actually happened or about how reliable the narrator’s perspective might be. The inherent limitations and unreliability of the first person point of view certainly help me to do this, but I’m also making conscious decisions, as the author, about what I want the narrator to actually know. Sometimes it’s the passage of time that limits the narrator’s ability to recall a certain event accurately, or sometimes, as in the case of my story “River Dog,” it’s a physical limitation. The narrator wasn’t physically present, and therefore will never be able know the truth about what happened. I do this partly to create tension, as you mentioned—our natural inclination to want to know the truth is what compels us to read on—but also to create multiple ways of interpreting the events of the story. As for what I choose to leave in or take out, it really depends on the narrator’s conflict and whether or not I feel that certain information, or the lack of certain information, will help to emphasize or reveal this conflict.

Kimball: I’m still curious about the specifics of what gets cut or left out. I’d love to see an example of something you cut from a story, maybe some backstory or some bit of information about what happened that was withheld for, say, narrative tension. Do you save any of that material?

Porter: Here’s an example of a paragraph I cut from my story “Merkin”:

“The night Lauren told me she was leaving I almost didn’t believe her. We were sitting on the couch, watching TV, and she had just finished packing for a trip she was taking to Arizona to see her parents. We had been fighting pretty badly at that time and she had said she needed a break, some time to clear her head and reassess things, and I had offered to cover her classes while she was gone. I was trying to be understanding about it, though I didn’t understand how going to Arizona would change anything.”

This is the first paragraph of a much longer section that goes into great detail about why the narrator’s girlfriend left him. In the revision, I decided that this section was not only too long, but that it also explained too much about the nature of their break-up. So, in my next draft, I decided to limit the details about the break-up to just a few paraphrased lines from a letter that she sent him after she left. This not only makes the reasons for their break-up seem much more mysterious to the reader, but also to the narrator.

Kimball: My curiosity is satisfied. Now let’s end by talking about the endings to your stories, which I found satisfying in a way that I find the ending to a good novel satisfying, that sense of a thoughtful closure. Could you talk about your thinking behind the end of a story?

Porter: Well, I think the main thing I’m thinking about when I get to the end of a story is how to end with a line or a piece of dialogue that will resonate emotionally with the reader. I was actually just talking about this the other day with my students, and I think that what it really comes down to is timing: delivering the right line at the right moment. And so, when I’m working on my endings, I’m thinking a lot about the reader and what the reader might be thinking or feeling at that particular moment in the story. I sometimes even start at the very beginning and read the story the whole way through, just so that I can get a sense of the overall pacing of the narrative and the emotional build-up to that final line or that final piece of dialogue. I don’t know if I’m always successful in doing this, but that’s what I’m thinking about at least.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, is now out in the US, UK, and Canada. The Believer calls it “a curatorial masterpiece.” Time Out New York calls the writing “stunning.” And the Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” His first two novels are THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY (2000) and HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS (2005), both of which have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. He is also responsible for the ongoing art project—Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)—and the documentary films, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).

Joseph Young’s book of microfictions, Easter Rabbit, was just released by Publishing Genius. Pasha Malla says, “One is tempted to compare Joseph Young’s marvelous collection of microfictions to many things — miniature portraits, maybe, or model ships inside bottles, or flashes of lives glimpsed through windows in the night.” A while back, Joseph Young interviewed me, as a reader, about one of his stories, “Eleven,” at Flash Fiction. So I thought that I would interview him about the same story, which is collected in Easter Rabbit, and I thought that I would do it by asking questions that will discuss each of the 30 words in “Eleven.”

Eleven

As she read essays, she plaited one side of her hair. You’d last forever, he said, up from his puzzle. The green light of some vehicle tracked across the ceiling.

Michael Kimball: Let’s start with the first word, As, which inaugurates the story with an adverbial participle and has some nice acoustical relations with last and puzzle and tracked. Could you talk about the choices behind starting the story with As and how you think about acoustics in your microfictions?

Joseph Young: I think I have a desire in some of my stories to start them with a kind of planned awkwardness, a moment of dislocation for the reader. I want them to come in a bit confused. Wait, what’s going on here? Who are these people, what are they doing? Starting with the As is almost like assuming the reader should know what’s going on, throwing them to the mercy of the situation. Something is happening, As, and something else is happening to that something concurrently. I think it’s awkward to make that assumption of precedent when there isn’t one. It’s also a bit awkward grammatically. The “stronger” sentence would probably start with the main clause, the plaiting of the hair, especially in this position in the story. As is even a bit bland, neither subject nor action, though it implies both. That awkwardness, the inversion of both sentence structure and storytelling, I suppose it’s like meeting someone shy at a party. You ask them a question and they mumble out a sort of strange, dislocated answer, awkward. In that situation, you might either turn away, find someone else to talk to, or you might lean in a little closer. What’s that? Who are you? What did you say?

Sound is really how I make sense of what I write. It’s often that I don’t understand the content of my stories. I’m not certain why the people in them are doing and saying what they are. I don’t understand why the imagery I’m using should be used. I work by feel a lot, trusting that if a line of dialogue and a certain image give off an energy when put next to each other, then they are worth pursuing as parts of a story. If these things radiate any kind of meaningfulness then I’m okay with not knowing what they mean. But it’s their sound, the rhythm of the words, the balance and dissonance between hard sounds and soft, that lets me know I’m on the right track. If the story fills the ear in the right way, it’s got to fill the head correctly too. The beat of As and last and puzzle, yeah, it sounds right, has the right music. You don’t need to understand music to move along in it.

Kimball: Since you said that you don’t understand why the imagery you use should be used, that’s what I want to talk about. Without talking about what they mean, could you talk about the meaningfulness that is radiated by some key words that create the imagery? I’m thinking of the first use of she, the verb plaited, the pronoun he, the noun phrase green light, and the way the use of ceiling works at the last word.

Young: Green light is the easiest of these probably, so I’ll start there. Green is go, and it’s something growing. It is a light that is growing? The story to me is kind, sweet. This couple, who I so often write about, whoever they are, they aren’t always getting along so well. But in this story, the he, he’s seems quite content, quite enamored of her, of she. That green light, which I guess is a bit otherwordly (what kind of vehicle makes such a light?), likely is rather lovely, up there on the ceiling, slowly tracking slowly. The story ends there, in the air, above them, and this is nice. They have a future, it appears, up in that green light, though maybe that is mostly in he, in he’s mind, while she, she’s still down below, reading essays. The story perhaps quite naturally starts with she, there down below, while he, up from his puzzle, he rises, with his light, to the ceiling.

Kimball: The future, the use of forever is another notable word choice, but I feel as if he is saying it while she isn’t necessarily agreeing with it. The contraction, You’d, gives us You would last forever instead of You will last forever. So I feel as if that bit of dialogue gives the piece a nice kind of tension there. Could you talk about that, your use of said (instead of some other verb), and why you have he look up from his puzzle (and whether the puzzle is a puzzle he’s working on or an expression on his face)?

Young: Well, I don’t know what kind of puzzle it is. I could guess, but I think this would be unwise, better to let it stay a puzzle. It’s preferable to me not to know, in any case. But he looks up from it because, how else will he see her? If he’s lost in a puzzle, perhaps she is something he is sure of, even if she isn’t? You’d last forever, he said, even if he, and they, didn’t? And he said it because he might otherwise says it. He said it, yesterday, or, I don’t know, last year. Whenever it was, back then, right now, in the telling, it is the future. What’s that future? Did they, or he, last forever? She would, of that I’m sure.

Kimball: Why is it preferable to not know? Also, you didn’t really talk about You’d. Why did you use the contraction instead of two words?

Young: The mystery of the things you write, how they got there, out of your head, on to the paper, and then, whatever does the heavy lifting in the writing process, the thing that makes up the puzzles, back there in the dark of the head, it’s better than me, smarter. I’m wary to disturb it.

You’d, I think you were onto that pretty close yourself. You will, or you would? You would is less determinant, less set. It doesn’t even quite make sense. You would, from whose vantage? And yet, to him, I think it does mean, even if he couldn’t say what it means. It’s more generous, isn’t it? If she will last forever, she would do so regardless, from whichever vantage, his or another’s. I guess, though, I’m still not answering your question, why the contraction. Oh, I know, because it sounds better. You would is one too many beats, the wrong cadence. Plus, you’d have to drag your lips across the w, and slow the sentence down. He wants to say it while it’s there, before it gets away, before that green light comes and goes.

Kimball: The speed of the sentence, yes, the contraction gives it a certain lightness. Speed, though, there are a bunch of places where the words force the reader to slow down (which I don’t mean in a negative way, it’s more considerate and thoughtful)—the repetition of she in the first sentence and those five single-syllable words at the end of the first sentence, one side of her hair. That speed sets the thoughtful, considered tone of the piece and the phrasing is echoed in the prepositional phrases at the ends of the other two sentences—[up from his puzzle] and across the ceiling. I wasn’t sure if I was going to ask a question here, but here it is: Is there anything that you’d like to say about the syntactical repetition?

Young: That last phrase of the first sentence, one side of her hair, you might say has a similarity to the other sentence endings as well, even though there we have an object of the verb rather than of the preposition. There is a similar running down in volume in each of those phrases, a descending in voice. I like the additive power of those kinds of repetitions. But the she read, she plaited, perhaps we get that these are similar actions, with similar intents. Maybe we see there is some basis for their concurrency. By the way, I didn’t consider this until now, but the plaiting of her hair, is that a puzzling of it too?

Kimball: We only have six words left and two of them are read essays. Why the choice that she read essays rather than, say, a novel or a newspaper or a magazine? I imagine a certain thoughtfulness, a kind of attentiveness, that goes with the plaited hair, but maybe you were after something else?

Young: I will reiterate that in terms of sense, logic, I wasn’t after anything in particular, with those words or any. Most of what I’ve said here in this (exceptionally enjoyable) interview has been guesses after the fact, information revealed to me as I answered your questions. But that out of the way, the essays, presumably factual, seem to be a different track for she than for he, who tends to be in the air about things. Maybe I’ll brush aside my earlier reservation and speculate that his puzzle is her, the stuff inside her head, the twistings of whatever logic she’s engaged in. She read essays, as he attempted to read her. Except for him, it’s about light, color, and maybe this is the trouble at the heart of the story, the misconnect of color and fact. In fact, I’d guess a lot of my stories are about this, people trying to piece together meaning out of humid clouds of words (a phrase from Young’s microfiction, “Epistemology”). In other words, they make, or don’t make, meaning from things without meaning. They are often lost in this attempt, although they still do have each other, for now.

Kimball: The four words we haven’t discussed yet are in the phrase, The green light of some vehicle. I don’t really have a question about this specific The, but maybe you can give us your thoughts on articles? And I feel as if you’ve already answered a question about of some vehicle, even though I haven’t asked one, but maybe there’s something you’d like to say about the phrase that would surprise me?

Young: Articles propel the sentence, push it off and keep it moving. The two vehicles of Buddhism are the lesser and the greater. The lesser is that the liberation of the self from suffering is first, while the greater wants first to free any being from suffering. The bodhisattva is propelled by compassion. Thanks a lot, Michael.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, Dear Everybody, is now out in the US, UK, and Canada. The Believer calls it “a curatorial masterpiece.” Time Out New York calls the writing “stunning.” And the Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” His first two novels are The Way the Family Got Away (2000) and How Much of Us There Was (2005), both of which have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. He is also responsible for the ongoing art project—Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)—and the documentary films, I Will Smash You (2009) and 60 Writers/60 Places (2010

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Michael Kimball: There are some great opening lines in Normal People Don’t Live Like This. One of the most striking opens the book: “It is not true that if a girl squeezes her legs together she cannot be raped.” My favorite is this: “Angeline Yost keeps a switchblade in her sock.” Could you talk a little about your thinking behind those opening lines and whether your journalism background comes into play with them?

Dylan Landis: First lines were hard to write for newspaper stories, and they’re harder in fiction. What goes on behind them is too graceless and accidental to be called “thinking” till I’m in deep, deep revision.

Like Angeline’s switchblade in “Rana Fegrina.” Boy, did I not see Angeline coming—I’d been coaxing Leah Levinson, my main character, into a classroom with two girls she fears and idolizes in a story called “Fire.” While that was going nowhere in five different ways, I opened my New York Times one morning to an article on a book called Slut! by Leora Tanenbaum, about how every high school designates one girl as the slut and she can’t escape the rep, even if she’s a virgin, even if it’s a lie. Angeline just burst through that newspaper and into my story, headed for a collision with Leah. I began writing a litany of ubiquitous slut rumors, and while writing the litany I remembered the switchblade. I was in sixth grade, zoned for a violent public junior high school in New York, when my mother came home and said she’d heard one girl threaten another at the school bus stop—”Don’t fuck with me. I got a knife in my sock.”

Pure Angeline.

So a lot of molecules had to bump into each other before I found that opening line, or any other first line. If I’d had eight arms, I couldn’t have typed fast enough that morning. But the story still took nine months. Journalism is fantastic preparation for researching, and for noticing key details, but even with deadline training I just can’t rush fiction out of the basement of the brain.

Kimball: Journalism as preparation for noticing key details, I like that. And you have fantastic details throughout Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Could you talk about key details as they relate to fiction—how you think about them, what work you want those details to do?

Landis: The novelist Jim Krusoe talks in his Santa Monica workshop about “enabling details,” the one or two quirky, often out-of-place details that let the reader instantly visualize the entire person or setting.

A woodstove stained from tobacco spit stood in the center of the room … A variety of bird wings were pinned to the wall.

–Chris Offutt, “Barred Owl,” from the collection Out of the Woods

It’s a stringent requirement to place on every detail—but it’s so freeing. No more pileups of adjectives. No clichés. A hunting cabin with antlers over the hearth is invisible because you’ve seen it untold times, but when Offutt shows you those singular tobacco stains and bird wings, you see this cabin in all its particularity; you see a hunting cabin as if for the first time.

In my mother’s hand was a fishing rod, and she was wearing a green fishing vest and pearls—a touch I’d always liked.

–Jim Krusoe, from Erased

An enabling detail tells you something about the person being described, or the person doing the noticing, or both. This can be subliminal, or telegraphed loud and clear. It can also be funny.

Details are my weakness. I spend forever excavating them; I fall in love with them; they’re the darlings I have to murder in revision. Just once I would like a permission slip from God that says, “Honey, it is okay to just write that an old woman has dementia.”

Leah’s grandmother, Sophia Rose, washed and dried her dinner plates, stacked them in the oven and set it on broil. She hid her pearls in the toilet tank, where they coiled under a rubber flap and created a perpetual flush.

–Dylan Landis, “Rose,” from Normal People Don’t Live Like This

Kimball: Your details do things other than give the reader character, though. There is a scene in “Underwater” where Angeline has a miscarriage in the toilet and Leah reaches into the toilet for it: “Slippery fish. Hanging half-deep in the water is a small, complicated clot, streaming veils of thin tissue.” Could you talk about what you were after with those descriptive details?

Landis: You’re right—details like this go to voice. Lynn Freed says, “Voice is the thumbprint of a piece,” and if your details are enabling and particular, if your cadences are interesting because you think about sentence structure, and if, finally, you try to eliminate every unnecessary word, you might end up with voice. I don’t know, but I think so.

A good detail always comes back to character, though, doesn’t it? Leah’s the one reaching for the fetus, so whatever she and I notice has to be in character. She’s precise, scientific, and subconsciously spiritual, and that dictates how she takes in the world.

So I’d guess my subconscious fed me the fish as a symbol of Christ or eternal life, never mind that Leah and I are both Jewish; and through many revisions I made the clot strangely beautiful—with those streaming veils—because Leah sees beauty in cells and dissected frogs and the ways that nature forms itself.

Say it was Angeline looking into the toilet—an impossibility, she never would. Trust me, she wouldn’t think “slippery fish.” She wouldn’t perceive delicate veils of tissue. She’d see gore. And all my details would be tinged with violence—which would tell you a lot about Angeline, whose stepfather isn’t afraid to leave bruises when he beats her.

Kimball: The details definitely go to voice, but there’s also something a bit shocking for the reader here. Reaching into a toilet would engage the disgust mechanism for most, so I’m also wondering what you were after in portraying these startling details so beautifully.

Landis: You’re right: I was worried that editors would think I was twisted and that readers would turn away. I truly didn’t want Leah to fish for that fetus. But moments of grace are usually precipitated by moments of violence, and miscarriage is a form of violence, and so I let her reach. It was in character. I also believe that if alarm bells go off, warning you not to write a scene, you need to write that scene.

I began researching miscarriages and 14-week fetuses, which is harder than it sounds. Some of what’s online, if you scrutinize the language, is tinged with awe. It looks like science but it’s subliminally reverent. I ended up suspicious of everything, even wondering if photos had been enhanced.

Then I realized that Leah’s perception of the fetus-details mattered more than the fetus-details themselves. Janet Fitch once said, “A character’s reaction to events is more important than what happens.” So I might not know if you could clearly see the fetus’s eyelids, but I could make the point of view so intensely Leah’s that more, not less, information is conveyed, and strict accuracy becomes almost moot.

Those could be eyelids, fused shut beneath the veiling. She decides they are. She imagines them lit by the ghostly blue glow of blood. Everything in this world that he needs to see, he sees.

–Dylan Landis, “Underwater,” from Normal People Don’t Live Like This

I’m still amazed by how spiritual it is—the blue is unoxidized blood, but later I learned that blue is the Virgin Mary’s color. Subconsciously I may have sensed it from visiting churches and looking at art. The unearthly internal light, the all-seeing vision: it’s Christ-like. That wasn’t deliberate; it resulted from a mix of subconscious flow of concrete imagery, followed by rigorous cutting, over and over, back and forth.

Kimball: So what other scenes did you write that another writer might have been warned away from writing?

Landis: No matter what scene you find in Normal People that looks troubling to write—and people ask about everything from the molestation-rape in “Jazz” to Helen’s starvation to Leah’s tapping-behaviors—no alarms ever went off due to personal trauma. Some writer once said: Don’t write only what you know, write what you can imagine. I can imagine a lot. You can’t possibly guess what part I found hardest to write.

Alarm bells do go off when I anticipate criticism or loss of privacy—this is really common. Freud said, when two people marry, six people get into bed. He should have seen the writer’s study; it’s far more crowded. Disappointed parents, shocked offspring, siblings who feel betrayed, your ex-wife’s lawyer, and all your Jewish, African-American or gay friends who don’t like the way you’re portraying your own. Personally I was horrified that my teenage son might read the stories and wonder how his mother knew about smoking and drugs and girls having s-e-x. But you write your story. You worry in revision.

The only scene that really hurt, that I never want to relive while writing, was the last part of “Rana Fegrina.” Leah’s father is dying, and as she suffers with this, the frog, Latin name rana fegrina, becomes Christlike. He becomes a source of wisdom about the nature of eternal love. I cried every morning in the shower for weeks, fearing the loss of my own father—who is still alive—and thinking about Christ in Gethsemane, a young man wanting to stay alive, and how I wanted my parents to live forever. I would rather write twenty versions of “Jazz” than write “Rana Fegrina” again.

–

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, is now out in the US, UK, and Canada. The Believer calls it “a curatorial masterpiece.” Time Out New York calls the writing “stunning.” And the Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” His first two novels are THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY (2000) and HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS (2005), both of which have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. He is also responsible for the ongoing art project—Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)—and the documentary films, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/writersonwriting/2009/12/09/details-are-my-weakness-michael-kimball-interviews-dylan-landis/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/writersonwriting/2009/11/30/my-narrative-mind-michael-kimball-interviews-joanna-howard/ http://thefastertimes.com/writersonwriting/2009/11/30/my-narrative-mind-michael-kimball-interviews-joanna-howard/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:23:42 +0000 Michael Kimball http://thefastertimes.com/writersonwriting/?p=110 Joanna Howard is the author of On the Winding Stair (BOA Editions, 2009) and In the Colorless Round, a chapbook with artwork by Rikki Ducornet (Noemi Press). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Chicago Review, Unsaid, Quarterly West, American Letters & Commentary, Fourteen Hills, Western Humanities Review, Salt Hill, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. Her stories have been anthologized in PP/FF: An Anthology, Writing Online, and New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills. She has also co-translated, with Brian Evenson, Walls by Marcel Cohen (forthcoming from Black Square, 2009). She lives in Providence and teaches at Brown University.

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Michael Kimball: I like the way that you often build long, complex sentences out of a string of clauses, especially, say, in a story like “Light Carried on Air Moves Less.” Could you talk a little about your thinking behind that?

Joanna Howard: For each of the stories in On the Winding Stair, I began with a particular sense of a rhythmic pattern: at times fractured and truncated, as with “The Tartan Detective,” at other times undulating, and almost breathless as with “Light Carried on Air.” The initial rhythmic instinct drives the sentence length, so that I have a sense of having completed a thought based on the need for a rhythmic pause. Beyond this initial rhythmic constraint, which is perhaps arbitrary or perhaps organic, I like the cause-and-effect relationships built up out of strings of clauses, so that a detail is presented, commented on, resolved to some degree, until it triggers the next detail. I have always liked the way the word “sentence” refers to a grammatical grouping, but also has a definition related to judgment and punishment of criminals: something which indicates verdict, as well as duration. This is how I think about sentences.

Kimball: So let’s take the opening of “The Tartan Detective” and talk about that rhythmic pattern:

“Inside this house, a precipice. The vacation repeats itself: the flight arrives late. Stationed in the inn, light breaks through the pale slatted blinds of the bedroom, carefully tucked into eyelet and down.”

I like the way the colon from the second sentence picks up the comma from the first sentence—a little bit of punctuation that balances the rhythm of the first two sentences. And I like the way the rhythm of the third sentence picks up the rhythm of the first two, but also seems to be spinning wider and wider outward, longer phrasings with a similar rhythm. And I love some of the acoustic things that are happening, the way “vacation” in the second sentence becomes “stationed” in the third sentence and then leads to a few other long-a words. Could you talk a little more about these three sentences, what is going on within them and from one to the next?

Howard: It worked just as you suggest, although the sound patterns come subconsciously, and then I move back from each analytically before going on to the next sentence. The method is one I’ve heard described as “consecution,” which I believe simply refers to sentences that build consecutively, but are driven as much by their grammatical markers as by their narrative content. It is not uncommon for me to begin with a sentence that disrupts standard grammatical expectations. The truncation, which removes the subject and verb, gives me increased flexibility with the surreal image. The second sentence takes the initial two-part structure of the fragments and builds a mirror structure, this time with two independent clauses, reliant now on concrete action rather than ambiguous or surreal imagery. Then, I like to break the pattern, the instinct being entirely sound based. I liked that what I was hearing was a kind of drone effect, with slight blips. These three sentences gave me the structure and the narrative of the story. I knew that from the elision of the two fragments of the first sentence, and the omission of a controlling verb tense, I was going to have a narrator who worked in notation (hence a detective or spy), and who had difficulty sorting out time. The second sentence suggested two narratives, running side by side, at times canceling each other out, at times building on images one from the other. Because my tendency is to hover in a space of indeterminate or partially obscured images, discipline dictated alternating these with concrete elements, so the third sentence locates the narrator, gives her a ruling tense, and the slatted blinds of film noir, but reversed, to focus on the light. I knew I was working with repetition and inversion. Funny result, given that when I sat down to think about why there would be a precipice inside this house, my narrative mind automatically assumed I would be writing a story about a couple having marital problems, maybe an affair taking place. This precipice turned out to be quite different.

Kimball: I love how much you pulled from those first few sentences, what that gave you in terms of structure and narrative and voice. That second sentence and the idea of two narratives, is that how you found your way to the parenthetical text that runs through the story or did that happen another way?

Howard: The parenthetical text was one I had brewing in the back of my mind for a while. It is a version of Michael Powell’s film I Know Where I’m Going about a girl who thinks she is going to marry a rich man, then gets sidetracked by a poor soldier on leave. Before I figured out what the second narrative would be, however, I had several sections of the main narrative (the girl detective/spy) and I left gaps, knowing that something would go there, even if I didn’t yet know what it was. Because I was still working on the theory that the main narrative was about a relationship gone wrong, I wanted the second narrative to be a sort of wild romantic fantasy, which I guess is why this film popped into my mind for the second narrative line: it’s a story in which the Scottish landscape seems to be conspiring to bring the lovers together. As I started to run the piece parallel, I began to see openings for connection between the two narratives. There was a way in which both pieces took up notions of fidelity, loyalty, and allegiance. There was also this notion of knowing where one is going, desiring to control the path our lives take, however inevitable it might be. As I worked to draw out imagistic and language chimes between the two narratives, the plot trajectory of each narrative adjusted. The game for me was to discover, within these two seemingly disparate stories, some common ground.

Kimball: I love the way those two stories come together. And I keep thinking about the other story you mentioned, the one with the couple having marital problems that didn’t get written, did that become another piece?

Howard: I think many of my stories are about couples having marital problems or relationship problems; it is just often the case that one of the partners is a ghost.

Kimball: Ghosts, I have to ask about “Ghosts and Lovers: a novel in shorts.” I love things that play with form, so tell me: What was the thinking behind the subtitle?

Howard: “Ghosts and Lovers” came out of a failed project to make a million dollars with what was, at the time, the hot ticket: a globe-trotting female first-person romance with epistolary chapters and recipes. However, when I began to write the chapters, they were coming out very short. Despite their conventional intention, they were still possessed of certain weirdnesses I can’t get beyond: fractured, gapped narrative, tentative, at best, cohesion through repetition and variation, emphasis on image, and character types rather than full-blown characters. Because I had sketched out a plot summary of the trajectory of the novel (something I had never done before, and have never done since), I was able to work them as a cycle of pieces, and because I had been spending a lot of time thinking about what constitutes a “short-short” versus what constitutes a “prose poem,” I wanted to put some of my thinking into play with the form. The subtitle was something I couldn’t resist because it does give me the image of a novel wearing shorts, as if it were in a Nair commercial. It is perhaps the most whimsical thing I’ve ever written, and because the narrative arc was already in place, I felt like I could let the individual pieces operate organically, so that some stand alone, and others are there as supporting columns. It gave me more freedom, and allowed the piece to come much more quickly than anything else I did in the book.

–

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, is now out in the US, UK, and Canada. The Believer calls it “a curatorial masterpiece.” Time Out New York calls the writing “stunning.” And the Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” His first two novels are THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY (2000) and HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS (2005), both of which have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. He is also responsible for the ongoing art project—Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)—and the documentary films, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).

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Michael Kimball: Why didn’t you use any commas in Kamby Bolongo Mean River?

Robert Lopez: I always start with language. It became clear right away that this narrator’s voice, his manner of speech was not at all measured or ordered. The second sentence — “I will say the hello how are you …” presented itself as one uninterrupted phrase, as opposed to “… the hello, how are you …” There was an urgency to his language, the syntax and diction and lack of punctuation all came together at once. After that there were a number of places where commas would ordinarily go, but it didn’t fit his voice or the tone of the piece.

Kimball: I loved the use of “the” in the bit you cite above and the way that usage recurs through the novel. But the lack of punctuation, it makes me think of some of the other constraints involved in the novel — everything from the fact that the narrator can only receive phone calls (and not make them) to the narrator’s limitations on understanding what is happening to him and around him. Could you talk about these constraints a bit?

Lopez: The world and the people in the world have always baffled me and I imagine that comes through in the work. It seems as though the narrators I’ve spent time with have a difficult time understanding what has happened to them and why it has happened. That the narrator of Kamby Bolongo Mean River is confined to a room with only a telephone that cannot dial out seems appropriate. I suppose most of us have felt like prisoners for one reason or another at one time or another. So far I’ve not been interested in the workplace as a setting for fiction, the office as prison, so to speak. I guess this reminds me of an argument between Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost. One insulted the other saying something like, “The trouble with you is you write about things.” The other replied, “Your trouble is you write about bric-a-brac.” Of course, they were both right and both wrong and both full of shit. So, some things interest me and others not so much. Perhaps that the narrator of KBMR wound up in a room with only a telephone speaks to the constraints of my imagination.

Kimball: Speaking of imagination, the narrator draws his life, his skewed memory of it, in stick figures on the walls of the room in which he is confined. How did that become part of the novel and why stick figures and why does he mostly draw naked?

Lopez: I suppose I’ve practiced what Donald Barthelme said about collage. I’ve mined older stories that didn’t quite work for material in both KBMR and Part of the World. So, I once had a story where a woman drew stick figures in a log cabin she inherited from her husband. (This part of the story was also resurrected in KBMR.) I imagine, for the narrator of KBMR, getting to tell his story this way was a substitute for any real contact with the outside world. The drawings are proof he was there, that he went through this experience. I saw it like cave paintings, which is why he drew in stick figures, which seem primitive to me. And all I’m capable of drawing myself, which is neither here nor there, but true nonetheless. I tend not to analyze why characters do what they do while I’m working. I trust whatever comes out, perhaps to a fault. That said, that he drew the stick figures naked makes sense. You could say he was rebelling against the uniforms he was issued and you could also say it’s indicative of wanting to escape, to be free again. None of this occurred to me as I was working on it, but as long as the action/language makes sense on an intuitive level I leave well enough alone. It’s only afterward, post-mortem, that I recognize connections and motivations and metaphors, any thing having to do with interpretation.

Kimball: Let’s talk about the revision process then. I’m especially curious for a novel like Kamby Bolongo Mean River with its non-traditional structure, all of its short paragraphs and line spaces. How much was moved around, rewritten, cut, etc.?

Lopez: KBMR started as a ten-page short story. I’d completed it and was pleased. A year or so later, I opened the story back up and was intrigued by the voice and thought I should see what else was there. Another ten-or-so pages came out, but I had to put it away for another year when life intervened. The next time I sat down the pages starting pouring out. I wrote the rest of the novel pretty much straight through, in one summer long breath. I always revise as I go, try to make sure every sentence is as it should be before moving on to the next. With  KBMR, there wasn’t that much work to be done after the initial composition. It more or less came fully formed. My first novel took years and years of tinkering and revising and shuffling pages and scenes around. I suppose I was lucky with KBMR.

Kimball: The writing process, there were multiple times in the novel when I felt as if the novel worked as a figuration about writing or, sometimes, a figuration about reading. For instance, on page 11, the narrator says this: “What you have to do is understand how people use words and go from there.” Then, in the next paragraph, he says this: “My problem is I think about one word for too long.” Then, four paragraphs later, this: “The sound between words can be great or small or great and small at the same time.” And on page 64, the narrator says this: “I could go the rest of my life without words and be fine.” Was all that writing/reading commentary just going on in my head or were you after something specific there?

Lopez: I wasn’t consciously trying to comment on writing or reading or the impossibility of such endeavors, at least in a meta-fictional sense. Certainly the narrator discusses his difficulties with language, which can be interpreted any number of ways. And I suppose this difficulty with language is a recurring theme for me, but it’s not something I “try” to do or tried to do in KBMR. I have done a few meta-fictional stories where the process of putting it together was part of the narrative. Language is always a big part of subject matter for me, it seems. The Beckett quote - “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” - is entirely accurate for me. Expression often, if not always, seems like folly, yet it feels necessary at the same time. And yet, “I can go the rest of my life without words and be fine.” feels just as true to me. Certainly, this is always in my head.

Kimball: Last question: I’ve been thinking about the connections between fiction and poker, and I know you play, so what do you think: Is the mind that writes novels suitable for a winning poker player? Is there any angle there?

Lopez: I would think the mind that writes novels is suitable for a winning poker player, but unfortunately not any more so than other disciplines, lawyering, banking, teaching, etc. Certainly writing a novel takes patience and a sense of timing and so does poker. Understanding patterns and psychology is necessary for both, too. This is an interesting question. I think further research is necessary.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, is now out in the US, UK, and Canada. The Believer calls it “a curatorial masterpiece.” Time Out New York calls the writing “stunning.” And the Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” His first two novels are THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY (2000) and HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS (2005), both of which have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. He is also responsible for the ongoing art project-Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)-and the documentary films, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).

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