Novelistic

Stephen Beachy

Stephen Beachy is the author of two novels, The Whistling Song, and Distortion, as well as a new pair of linked novellas titled Some Phantom/No Time Flat.  His fiction has appeared in Best American Gay Fiction, BOMB, The Chicago Review, Blithe House Quarterly, and his nonfiction has appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.  In 2005, he bore the dubious honor of unmasking the "Real JT Leroy" in a piece for New York Magazine.  Raised by Mennonites "somewhere in the Midwest" and educated in part at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he now lives in California where he teaches at the University of San Francisco.

The two novellas Some Phantom/No Time Flat share some common themes (wandering adults,  possible crimes, sexual abuse, parents and children).  Were these  simultaneous projects that purposely came together?  Did they spring  from a similar inspiration?
Some Phantom actually predates No Time Flat considerably.  I think I began working on it in the mid 90s, was trying to sell it by 1999 or so. A few editors liked it well enough, but thought it too slight to stand on its own.  By the point I realized it wasn't going to happen on its own, No Time Flat existed as about thirty pages plopped down in the middle of a chaotic novel.  Once I decided that it actually belonged as the other half of Some Phantom a lot of pieces fell into place.  There were thematic links already present, and others emerged, both unconsciously and as the result of very conscious processes of interweaving the two.

What was your intention with the "crime scene investigation" and  police report texts in No Time Flat?  I found myself consistently  wondering if or how they might be connected to the main character,  Wade, but was left, I think intentionally, uncertain.
Yes, that's right.  I definitely was using them to create narrative tension, and to invite the reader to guess at connections, look for connections and even to make connections that would mimic the process of solving a crime.  Looking at those processes and, in some ways subverting them, or at least highlighting the misguided assumptions, biases and conclusions that might stem from these processes, was very much part of the project.  There’s something that happens when the suspect of these reports is being incriminated, based on his reading materials – lots of references to murdered children and so on – that implicates the reader, I hope.  Since the reader is also reading such a book.

They are very funny, these "police reports," using a lot of  problemetized "words" in quotation marks, much like the text of the  story itself.  Did you have a particular voice in mind when writing  these?
I looked at actual police reports stemming from the case of those three teenage boys who were railroaded for the murder of three children in West Memphis some years back.  These murders were examined in the documentary "Paradise Lost" and its sequel, and almost certainly committed by the step-father of one of the boys.  I kept some of the details of that case, with which I hoped I might create a sort of ghostly suggestion of it for those familiar with it, while I added and changed details to suggest elements of both of the novellas.  The police reports I looked at were on a website critical of the investigation, and so often included a very skeptical, parenthetical voice that I’m sure leaked into my own version.  As well as my own skeptical, parenthetical voice, and the voice of the narrator of No Time Flat, who is close to Wade, but not without a largish ironic distance.

Was there anything that you consciously wanted to avoid in writing  about these arguably marginal characters and their arguably marginal  desires?
Both books are about the easy shift from one version of events to another, from one way of understanding a story or a memory or a few sporadic facts or observations to another.  They’re trying to get at some of the arbitrary ways we make meaning of our lives.  So I guess I tried to avoid some of the easiest or most prevalent ways that we seem to do that in America these days.  The psychology of the family unit is maybe the most obvious thing that's barely there; I really wanted to treat these two protagonists as people who had formed themselves, or been formed by more random and chaotic forces than mommy and daddy.  And while it might not seem obvious, I also tried to work against the idea that the major threat to children is posed by strangers with guns, pedophiles, and murderers wandering the landscape.  I personally believe there's a lot more to fear from the parents and institutions that “take care” of children (if I may problematize a phrase here) than from monstrous child-murderers.  But I certainly used the expected fears of those familiar monsters for narrative tension, and because I was dealing in a lot of ambiguity I think I created possible readings of events very different from my own. 

I also tried to avoid clear labels or diagnoses.  I tend to see desires and states of mind as things that exist on a continuum, and the whole concept of “normality” I’ve never found very useful for making sense of my own experience in the world, certainly not when it comes to sexual desire.  I don’t know what normal sexual desire would look like, and I’ve certainly never met anyone who had it.  So it was interesting with Wade, for example, for me to simply describe some of the things he was thinking and feeling, while avoiding words that put them into categories.  Imagining a character with a less firm grasp of some very common cultural references than myself opened up a fun space to defamiliarize things, I think.  Fun for me, at least.

I'm really curious about the woman at the center of Some Phantom.    Did you have a diagnosis in mind?
I certainly had models in mind, but, as I said, I'm pretty skeptical about diagnoses in general.  Psychology, as practiced in America, is pretty barbaric, and whenever you look back at even its recent past, from a distance of say thirty years out, you see this clearly deluded state of affairs, with lobotomies, electroshock therapy, Valium prescriptions for unhappy housewives, and a whole range of common sexual desires treated as pathologies.  I think thirty years from now, or hopefully much sooner, our current era will be seen as something akin to the dark ages.  Between our blithe medication of children and our usually silly quest for the genes that cause specific behaviors, we're in a seriously confused world of diagnoses and treatments for mental health.  Which isn't to say that the woman in Some Phantom doesn't have some serious issues, or that people in general don’t suffer a great deal from mental afflictions. She's sometimes paranoid, certainly, a state of affairs she tries to crush with a kind of hyper-rationality.  More than a diagnosis though, I'd again say she's capable of certain states of mind that are quite common.  I think most of us are paranoid at times, or at least capable of paranoia.  It's a particular misreading of affairs that places the self at the world's center, an understandable impulse in a world in which very few people and no institutions actually care much about other people's goals and desires, except to make use of them, usually to sell something.   I wanted to look at how easily one can sort of slip over that line where misreadings become mental illness, I guess.  One very important model was The Turn of the Screw, but by way of the film version, "The Innocents", starring Deborah Kerr.  Truman Capote wrote the screenplay, and underlined some of the queer subtext which that old queen Henry James had consciously or unconsciously introduced.  In the film it's clear that the prim governess, from a strict religious background, is horrified by the little gay boy she's taken charge of and his improper relationship with his rough trade ghost.  Also, after I'd written the first draft I saw Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls", whose rational protagonist, stuck between the world of the living and the world of the dead, seemed very much akin to my protagonist in a bizarre number of ways.

Both of these novellas deal with dark subjects but are consistently  hilarious in their delivery.  Would you say humor has always been a  part of your writing?  Would you care to expound for a minute on why it pays to be funny?
Dark humor feels like a particularly accurate worldview, I suppose, or at least one that suits me.  The food chain is just grotesque in its horror, and we're all going to suffer and die, but humor is one of the great consolations. You back up out of the human situation a bit and we seem pretty hilarious.  We're such nasty and deluded primates, but even our cruelty can be so ridiculous it's comic.  I've always at least tried to be funny, sometimes more than others.  Without humor I'd feel pompous or smug, I think, which is one reason humor pays.  What reader wants to be lectured or to even be shown the world by somebody who takes themselves so absolutely seriously?  I can't read Thomas Mann, for example, and I have issues with Joyce; even his attempts at humor come off as the lame attempts of a man utterly convinced of his own genius and the grandeur of his project to humanize himself.  There are definitely many writers I love and who've influenced me, maybe most of them, who use dark humor.  Joy Williams absolutely, William Burroughs, Ralph Ellison, Denis Johnson, Ascher/Straus, Clarice Lispector, Roberto Bolaño.  Good social satirists like Han Ong, Gary Indiana, Jessica Hagedorn and Colson Whitehead are almost always funny and dark.

You are quoted as having said that "Female Convict Scorpion:  Jailhouse 41" is one of the greatest films ever made.  Please explain.
It was made in 1972, the second in a series of four women's prison films about a silent and unjustly imprisoned convict named Scorpion.   I haven’t seen the last two, they’re harder to find, but it’s pretty universally agreed that they pale next to the first two, and it’s the second that really transcends the genre’.  The surreal landscapes, special effects, awesome soundtrack and unsentimental feminism elevate this film into one of the strangest, most visually interesting and moving films ever made. Seven escaped female convicts flee through ruined villages, meet ghost women, and fight for their lives.  Scorpion’s film persona seems to have been influenced by the spaghetti westerns, Clint Eastwood in particular.  Meiko Kaji stars as the stoic, vengeful woman, but she’s much more of a badass than Eastwood ever was.  The final revenge fantasy takes the film into the stratosphere. I love B movies that transcend their genre’ to become cosmic; "The Brain That Wouldn’t Die" is another great example, or "X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes," starring Ray Milland.

Because you were the first to unmask Laura Albert as JT Leroy (New  York Magazine, October 2005), I thought I'd ask what your  afterthoughts were, if any, on how story played out in the media?  It  seems clear that many agreed there was something insidious about the  AIDS angle that made this more than just a clever literary hoax.  Has  there been anything you've heard or seen since the story broke that  particularly shocked or bothered you?  I've noticed that JT's website  features a faux headline "The Real JT Writes On" and links to  interviews with Laura, as well as a couple of dead links to her band  Thistle's website.  I imagine someone has probably given Laura Albert  another book deal?
The last I heard, nobody was going near Laura’s book proposal.  I think she’d polluted so many relationships as JT, and left such a trail of lies and fraud that not even the New York publishing world was willing to take the chance on her.  That could change, of course.  I’ve also heard rumors that she’s working on a documentary.  The more interesting documentary (which I’ve been consulted on), however, is being produced by a San Francisco woman Marjorie Sturm.  She had been hired by JT at some point to make a documentary, but they killed it when they realized that Savannah Knoop, who played JT in public, would be recognized.  Marjorie has all of this footage from early on, and she’s interviewed everyone involved with the story, with the exception of Laura. Nothing Laura does could much shock me any more.  Mostly she just runs around threatening to sue people.  Laura’s whole angle, since going public, has been that she in a big way really is JT, because she had an abusive childhood, she spent time on the streets, and so on.  Taking on a male identity is supposed to be a combination of feminist necessity and fun-loving gender play.  But she’s behaved so monstrously that her plea for sympathy as a victim isn’t getting her much traction.  People have really focussed on the HIV angle, as the most obnoxious lie, but I’m not so sure.  S/he never underlined the HIV thing so much; it was an excuse s/he used early on not to show up in public, because of the unsightly Kaposis’s on JT’s face.  But the whole white trash, West Virginia, fundamentalist child-abusers he was supposedly raised by, the grand-daddy who bathed him in lye, the whole JT bio, really, was pretty sick in the way it made use of abuse narratives, combined with common stereotypes, and whatever roots it had in her own dysfunctional personality, a large part of it was always about scamming, and about her own success.  At the same time, it does seem to me that Laura was and still is mentally ill, and I have more sympathy with her than many commentators.  It’s like Kim Novak in "Vertigo" – another movie with a large presence in the novellas – she’s played this role and made Jimmy Stewart love her, but then she meets him again, no longer the blond aristocratic queen, but a trashy brunette from Salina, Kansas, who wears too much makeup.  And she wants him to love her for herself, but he just wants to transform her into the fake woman he remembers.  Kim Novak does a brilliant job of capturing the torment of somebody so desperate to be loved that they’ll become whatever the lover wants.  And Laura must have been tormented in a similar way.

As far as how it played out in the media, there’s been a lot of focus on Laura, either how evil and fraudulent she is or how misunderstood and merely a fun-loving prankster she is.  But I think it’s more complicated and interesting than either of those positions implies.  Her actions were very dark, in terms of how she manipulated people, how close she got to a lot of people, and how she used their fantasies against them.  But our culture is equally dark, and the literary world is equally dark, and there’s been very little examination of the cultural assumptions that she used and the things that she unintentionally revealed about celebrity culture and the literary world especially, and the outrageous things that people wanted to believe in.

What is your next project?
First there's a more-or-less finished novel that Suspect Thoughts will bring out sometime in the next few years, I believe.  I tend to work on several things at once, so that when I get bored or stuck I can move over to a different track.  I'm trying to finish these essays I've been working on forever, which are all related but which have divided themselves into two books.  The first I'm calling Dreams of Terror and Abuse, which includes pieces about September 11th, Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder, JT LeRoy, the recent shooting at that Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, and one I haven't written yet about my ex-Amish aunt who drowned herself a few years ago, when she was in her 60s. The second one I'm calling Dreams of Transformation, and it's more tightly focused on evolutionary myths: the relationship between Neanderthals and early homo sapiens, the gay gene, the global brain, empaths and sociopaths.  Meanwhile, I'm tinkering with another novel that's still too unformed to say much about.  At the moment, the models driving it are 1001 Nights and the work of Roberto Bolaño.

Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez has published five novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, and The Last of Her Kind.  Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including two Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature.  A Feather on the Breath of God was a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Award.  Sigrid Nunez has also been both a Rome Prize Fellow and Berlin Prize fellow, the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, and is a 2006 fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.  She has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University and the New School, and has been a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College and at Washington University. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Rope Walk Writer’s Retreat.  She lives in New York City. 

Where did the story of this novel start for you?
I’d always been interested in what happens when two kids who are complete strangers to each other go away to school and are expected to live together in the same small room.  I wanted to take two girls from completely different worlds and put them into the particular cauldron of a freshman dorm inside the larger cauldron of the politicized late sixties. I thought I could tell a lot about the era and its aftermath by exploring their friendship over the years.  Also, I was looking for a story that would allow me to explore two issues that have been important in all my work, race and social class, which is also why I decided to set part of the book in an American prison.  And I was intrigued by the idea of writing something about the consequences of the use of the ‘N’ word, and to have that be a key element in a criminal trial.

Your last two novels have featured characters looking back on specific experiences of the late 1960s, one as a nurse in Vietnam and the other as a sort of witness to a counterculture that her friend and sister become more enmeshed in.  Did one story lead to the other in any way?
Yes. It was while writing For Rouenna that I started thinking about writing The Last of Her Kind. I realized I still had a lot more I wanted to say about that era.

Did you end up finding anything particularly revealing about the era, and its effects on your characters Georgette and Ann, in terms of class? Do you see Ann's fate (as a radical who is ultimately imprisoned) as, in some way, the result of privilege?
I'd say one of the main things the book is about is how the characters' class backgrounds shape their personalities and influence their entire lives. Ann is an extreme case, of course. But I did want to show how one young person's sincere torment over having been born to white-skin privilege could result in a kind of madness.

Your narrators tend to have a patient style, providing a depth of detail that gives them the gravitas, or authenticity, of non-fiction. Is this purposeful? I know your first novel A Feather on the Breath of God had many autobiographical elements, but as far as I know the others have not.
It’s purposeful in the sense that I want the lives and experiences I’m inventing to seem as authentic as possible. And when you have a first-person narrator looking back on her life, as I do in my last two novels, I guess it’s inevitable that the narrative is going to read partly like a memoir. A Feather on the Breath of God does have many elements taken from my life and from my parents’ lives. For Rouenna and The Last of Her Kind are memoirs in form but not in fact.

You write a particularly evocative scene that takes place at Altamont, and you've said that though you were at Woodstock, you chose to write about Altamont which was an event you would have to research and invent an intimate perspective on. Why did you make this choice? Was this in part because Altamont is more emblematic of things you wanted to explore in this book?
Not at all.  In my second book, Naked Sleeper, I sent a couple on a second honeymoon. Instead of sending them to Paris or London or Rome, cities I myself had visited, I sent them to Venice, where at the time I'd never been. Writing about Altamont rather than Woodstock came from the same desire: to invent rather than remember. For one thing, it's more interesting--and fun--for me, as a writer, to exercise my imagination, and I have this idea that what I am forced to invent completely will end up being more interesting to the fiction reader as well. I know people think almost everything I write about really happened. In fact, as you see, even if it's a whole lot more trouble, I'd rather make things up. One thing I really enjoyed researching and writing about in The Last of Her Kind was prison life, of which I have no experience myself at all. Of course, when you write about what you don't know you run the risk of getting things wrong. And that risk is part of the fun and the challenge of writing fiction.

Speaking of the perceived power of acid trips, your narrator writes, "Everyone said you would never forget those trips.  But everyone I know has forgotten them, even the part about meeting God." Discuss.
The experience of tripping is so totally amazing you can’t believe you’ll ever forget it. You think you’ll be talking about it for the rest of your life. But that’s not what happens. The experience becomes remote rather quickly, and no one talks about their acid trips years after the fact. Most people my age haven’t thought about the acid trips of their youth in decades.

Who are some writers who have most influenced your work?
Philip Roth’s fiction was an influence on both For Rouenna and The Last of Her Kind. The work of W.G. Sebald and V.S. Naipaul influenced For Rouenna. But the writers who have influenced me most are two mentors: Elizabeth Hardwick and Susan Sontag.

Nicholas Montemarano

Nicholas Montemarano is the author of the short story collection If the Sky Falls (2005), and the novel A Fine Place (2002).  His fiction has been published in Esquire, Zoetrope, DoubleTake, Agni, The Antioch Review, Fence, and many other magazines.  His short stories have been cited in The Best American Short Stories for 2001, 2002, 2005, and 2006.  He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation.  He is Assistant Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. 

Many of the stories in If the Sky Falls deal with violence that feels almost rote, expected, even banal. Cruelty in these stories isn't judged so much as it's presented for our interpretation, or identification. Let me first ask, are you tired of getting asked about how and why your stories are violent?
More often people ask why my stories are so dark. That’s the word they use. Readers seem even more intrigued after they meet me and discover that I’m a happy, well-adjusted, sensitive guy. The truth is, and people think I’m nuts when I say this, I don’t see my stories as dark. All of the stories in the collection are written in the first-person point of view, and so no matter how difficult the subject matter, there’s still that ‘I’ telling the story – there’s life and light in the telling. And if there’s energy and beauty in the prose, which is what I strive for, then there’s light in that too. One of my favorite short stories is “The Patron” by Jayne Anne Phillips from her collection Black Tickets. The subject matter – a dying old man who spends most of the story coughing and gagging; the young man who takes care of him and likes watching porn in his spare time – is pretty dark. But the sentences are beautiful, and that’s enough for me. I don’t finish the story depressed as much as elated. I feel alive and hopeful, despite the grim subject matter. All that said, I can’t deny that I seem to be interested in violence and its aftermath – the evidence is in my stories and even in my first novel, A Fine Place. I suppose I’m not afraid to look at things, especially those things that trouble or frighten me. Most of the stories in my new collection don’t explore violence, but they’re certainly looking at things that can be difficult to look at. No matter what I’m writing about, my intention is never to judge the characters or their actions. Quite the opposite, actually. To not judge.

Outside of, say, school and reading, what life experience would you say has had the most impact on your writing?
Therapy. Without question. I’ve been in therapy for over ten years and it changed everything for me, not just in my life but in my writing. What I discovered, among many other things, sitting in a chair for an hour or two every week, talking about myself, was that my life was interesting and rich and worth writing about. When I was around 27, just before I started writing my first novel, I found myself suddenly writing much more autobiographically than I ever had. I suppose I used to look for my stories somewhere in the ether. Now I was looking inward, which is where I still look. That inclination to look inward, rather than outward, came from practicing every week in therapy. It’s probably why Virginia Woolf is my favorite writer: her novels are so much about the interior lives of her characters.

How did the story “The November Fifteen” come about (in which a group of men are tortured and there is a subsequent commercialization of the tragedy using the symbolic '11/15')?
Some people read this story in Esquire and assumed that it was inspired by Abu Ghraib.  It was published in September 2004, only a few months after the Abu Ghraib story broke. I’m sure that’s why Esquire rushed to publish it so soon after accepting it. But the truth is, I started that story a few years earlier. There were two triggers for the story. The first was that I knew someone who was tortured, and I’ll leave it at that. Later, I found myself reading a book about torture, and I couldn’t believe how often it happens and how rarely something is done about it. The second trigger was the one-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I was watching the news, and it seemed like everyone – the media, politicians – was trying to appropriate that tragedy in some way. It bothered me, and I started writing. I’ve written about torture since then, too. It fascinates and angers me that your body can so easily be used as a weapon against you.

In one story, you describe the fatigue and frustration of a home healthcare worker caring for two elderly, severely disabled people. In another, you describe a woman leaving behind her child at the park to teach her a lesson. In another, there is a brother who somewhat reluctantly goes to the aid of his sister who is getting abused by her boyfriend. The common thread in these is a kind of play with the reader's sympathy--your characters being partly, but never simply, sympathetic. Is the idea to make all readers identify, on some level, their own flaws or lack of sympathy?
The most important thing is that characters are never simply one thing or another – they must be complex. Flawed yet sympathetic. Human. If you can pull that off as a writer, you’re doing okay. If readers identify their own flaws, fine.  If readers feel sympathy, great. If readers are changed as a result of reading one of my stories, great. But the first goal, before any other, is to make readers read the story. Get them to the last word. Make it so that they can’t stop. What happens during that journey, what emotions are evoked, isn’t something I could predict, and wouldn’t want to, especially not while I’m writing.

What is the earliest creative thing you can remember writing?
A pretty bad story when I was a senior in high school that had something to do with fate, a Twilight Zone type of thing. Guy somehow gets a message – maybe he’s psychic or something, can’t remember – that his sister is going to die in a car accident, so he gets in his car and races to stop her, but in his haste to find her he loses control of the car and hits her, etc. It was rejected by the high school literary magazine, and I remember one of the editors coming up to me – he was a real smug kid – and saying, “Hey Nick, nice try with that story.” Part of me wonders if my ego wanted me to become a writer just to shut that kid up.

What books or writers would you say had the greatest influence on you or on your style?
Virginia Woolf showed me that sentences must be beautiful and that everything can happen even when not much seems to be happening. To the Lighthouse is, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever written in English. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried showed me how much I value emotional honesty and the fine line between fact and fiction, which interests me greatly and keeps showing up in my own work. In general, I’ve always been drawn to writers with distinctive prose styles – writers whose work I would be able to identify even if their stories were published anonymously. Hubert Selby, Jr. didn’t need to sign his name to his work, if he didn’t want to. Steven Millhauser wouldn’t have to. David Means wouldn’t have to. José Saramago wouldn’t have to. You just read the first few sentences and think, Okay, I know who that is.

Susan Steinberg

Susan Steinberg is the author of The End of Free Love, a collection of short fiction published in 2003, and most recently a second collection titled Hydroplane.  She has a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, Boulevard, Quarterly West, and other publications.  She has been awarded fellowships from the University of Massachusetts and Yaddo, and she teaches at the University of San Francisco.

You used to be a painter and even got a degree in painting.  What made you turn to writing? 
I was painting all day, every day, and when I got home from my studio at night, I had so much energy, I needed another creative outlet.  So I started bringing my typewriter into my bed and writing these terrible rants about people I didn't like or something my boyfriend said or someone I had a crush on.  Then I was buying these cheap spiral notebooks and filling several of those a week.  After a while, I took a writing workshop in Boston, then another.   So it was a gradual shift.

Do you think this, in any way, makes you a more 'visual' writer?
I think that depends on how you define "visual."  I don't think I'm much into creating standard setting or character description.  But I think there's a visual component to my stories, on the page.  And I have a tendency to track images through a story in the same way I did when painting.

Do you think you'll ever go back to painting?
I don't know.  I think there are a few ways to answer this question. Part of me wants to admit that I generally don't go back to things. When I do, it's because I want to repair or resolve something, and I don't have that relationship with painting.  Perhaps this is because -- and here's the other way I want to answer the question -- in some ways I never left it.  Painting and writing are extremely similar processes for me.

A lot of your stories deal with sex--not the act itself so much as the approach of it, the awkwardness or embarassment of adolescent sex, the ways people shape their sexual identities... Discuss.
When I write or paint, I feel most alive and most like I'm creating actual art when I find myself up against a boundary of some sort (put up by either the literary world or myself) which I then destroy.  I usually knock down the more structural/formal boundaries, but on occasion, I find these walls firmly planted in the content of a story, as well.  So if I find myself thinking, You can't write that, I'll force myself to write it.  It seems these content-blocks present themselves to me the most, perhaps, when dealing with characters' sexual identities, because in some ways it's more risky to write the awkwardness of adolescent female sexuality than it is to write a full-on sex scene or erotica (which I have no desire to write).

Your writing tends to contain a certain kind of recursion, a circling back of certain words, phrases, and images that become a sort of framework of a given story.  Did this happen naturally in your writing?  Where do you see the root of this part of your technique?
Some of this circling happens naturally; phrases or words get stuck in my head and reaapear in a story serendipitously.  Though often enough, I'll consciously return to a phrase and try to rework it in a new context or section, to give it new meaning, or to emphasize the importance of it -- compulsive as that may be.  As for the "root," I don't think this technique is about just one thing.  It's a rhetorical device, but this isn't something I'm thinking about as I write.  Sometimes I'm just in the zone, and sometimes I'm trying to create echoes and rhythm, build momentum, and recreate characters' obsessions or obsessive natures.  I did the same thing when I was painting.  I would build a cast of characters (or an alphabet) -- objects, lines, shapes -- and repeat them throughout a piece.

Where do stories usually start for you?  With a situation, a phrase, a voice?
I've been asked this question before, and I'm just now starting to realize that my stories all start in different ways.  For example, the story "Away" began with an image of clouds looking like a ribcage.  That was it.  No story, no voice, no scene.  But "Isla" started with a voice and then a list.  And "To Sit, Unmoving" began with a scene:  a man getting punched in the face on the street. Maybe it's more important to say that I never ever ever start with plot.

Do you see yourself primarily as a short story writer? As opposed to another kind of writer  (like novelist or poet)? 
Or as opposed to teacher?  Or person?  I suppose either way the answer is yes.

What do you have to say about the term 'experimental'?
I have to say that it's not a genre (like "romance" or "mystery").

What's the opposite of experimental?  Conventional?  Is everyone who's not conventional experimental?  When does an 'experiment' become commonplace anyway, like stream of consciousness, which has been around since Joyce and Woolf and doesn't seem so experimental anymore?
I'm not convinced that the opposite of experimental is conventional. There are some wonderful conventional stories that have enough experimentation in them.  The stories in Jesus' Son, for example, rely on some fairly conventional techniques, but then Johnson'll throw in these mindblowing swerves, unlike any other writer's, that make the reader feel like he's encountered something for the first time.  Perhaps the opposite is "formulaic"?    If "experimental" suggests someone has been in the lab trying out new things (whether the results are successful or not), well, formulaic suggests the opposite. As far as the experimental becoming commonplace, the avant-garde, sadly, has a short shelf-life.  Something's startling and banned one second, and everyday product the next.  So perhaps Molly Bloom's soliloquy isn't as wild as it once was (though it's still totally wild to me), but it's up to us, I think, to advance whatever is spinning its wheels, to take that stream of consciousness technique, for example, and do something new with it.

Name some novels and short stories that were a significant influence on how you think about writing.
I wasn't originally influenced by writers.  I was influenced by visual artists and one girl from art school who wrote these little stapled-together books of enraged poetry.  But the books I love are To the Lighthouse, Nadja, The Lover, Mrs. Dalloway, The Maverick Room, and Halls of Fame.

Lewis Buzbee

Lewis Buzbee is a San Francisco writer whose first novel, Fliegelman's Desire, was published in 1990.  His writing has appeared in Harper's, Paris Review, Gentleman's Quarterly, The New York Times Book Review, Black Warrior Review, ZYZZYVA, Best American Poetry 1995, and elsewhere.  He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco, and recently he published a memoir about the book trade called The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, as well as a collection of short stories titled After the Gold Rush.  We spoke in person at his home in the Sunset District of San Francisco. 

You've clearly learned a lot about the history of the book trade in writing this book.  What was the most surprising detail you came up with in your research?
I think the most surprising detail that came up was simply the longevity of the book trade and the notion of a bookseller going back at least three thousand years.  We usually think of the book trade coming into being with the Guttenberg press, but it turns out that in classical Rome, the Rome of the Caesars onto the beginning of Christian Rome, there was a huge and thriving book trade that we would completely recognize as similar to the book trade we see today, with chain stores, and author appearances, and people working for minimum wage or less, Roman slaves, who were happy to have that job because it meant they weren't coal mining.

Do you have a favorite bookstore?  Top 3?
I'd have to say City Lights, in San Francisco, because it's such a surprising bookstore.  You see things on the display tables at City Lights that you never see anywhere else, even at the most sophisticated university bookstore.  And it's still sort of a down-at-heels, worn out kind of bookstore.  They've done a lot of great work, especially with the publishing program, and in the last few years they've bought the building and refurbished it, and the place has been there something like fifty-three years.  So I urge you to put your credit card away if you go there because you're gonna be screwed no matter what.  You've got this wonderful poetry room that's bigger than some bookstores.  And you step out the door and you've got this great view of the skyline of San Francisco, and you've got three world class bars within rock-throwing distance, you've got tourists and limousines and strip clubs and Chinatown right there and there's just a confluence of everything I want in a bookstore.  Probably my second favorite is Galignani Bookstore in Paris, which is the oldest English language bookstore on the Continent—late eighteenth century.  It's a great bookstore with tall, dark wooden shelves and rolling library ladders, so you've got that, but it's also right on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, and I think probably why it's one of my favorites is because it's in Paris.

And how many businesses have survived continuously for two hundred years?
There are certainly very few.  That's what's so dismaying about seeing these Bay Area bookstores close, like Cody's and A Clean Well-Lighted [Place for Books].  Cody's has been around forever.  The same vintage as Kepler's and City Lights, which came along after World War II at the beginning of the paperback revolution, and at the beginning of a burgeoning West Coast literary scene, and helped create the anti-war movement and the free-speech movement.  But, all things considered, fifty years is probably a pretty good run.

In every age there are a lot of doomsayers, about any number of topics, and there are certainly a lot them now when it comes to the future of the book or the novel, but I tend to have sort of a conservative perspective on this—like, does it really have to change, and will it necessarily?  As a former bookseller and then a publisher's rep I imagine you have a pretty interesting perspective on this.
Well despite what people are saying we're still producing and selling more and more books every year.   In the book I talk about how in the nineteenth century, when the bicycle became popular, social critics came out and said, oh well, this is it, the end of literary culture as we know it.  People are just going to be riding their bicycles all the time and they will never read again.  But social critics said this at the dawn of the moving picture, and the radio, and the television…they probably said it of disco, and they've said it of the computer, and the VCR, and the internet, and the iPod, and I just don't see it.  There are 4 million titles in print right now, and if we stopped printing books right now there would still be all the objects around.  And it's a great technology.  It doesn't break.  Anybody can use a book providing they know how to read.  We do like things that have shiny lights and loud noises and pretty colors and go zoom, but we like to immerse ourselves in a quieter world too. 

I always figure as we spend more and more time in front of computer screens and video monitors that there will be more of a backlash of people wanting a vacation from electricity.
Let your eyeballs get some rest… there's such a difference physiologically between reading text on a computer screen and reading a book.  Neurologists have studied this.  Even when you're looking at a computer screen you're far enough away from it your eyes don't track back and forth, it's almost a static thing.  But when you're reading a book your eyes track back and forth and it provides a certain kind of exercise for your brain.

You also have a book of short stories out, After the Gold Rush.  How do you think your experience as a bookseller influences you as a fiction writer.
I think if I had paid more attention as a bookseller, I probably wouldn't be writing short stories.  I'd probably be writing genre novels and trying to pass myself off as a young, sassy woman.  But unfortunately I'm stuck with literature.  If anything, bookselling has exposed me to this great ocean of literature, from works in translation to experimental work to classics that you just don't get in high school and college, which really alerted me to the possibilities in fiction and gave me a sense of the very best that's out there.

A lot of your stories are about family dynamics, parents with children—I guess it's a pretty obvious observation that being a parent has influenced writing?  Would you say it's changed your perspective?
Being a parent changed my life immediately, from the second my daughter was born.  The minute it happened my writing changed in a way I could not have foreseen, and I guess it has to do with having added some weight to my life.  Before that I'd been a rather carefree bachelor guy and I didn't know or didn't feel rather the importance and the dread and the fragility of life as keenly as I felt it when I first picked up my daughter.  So many of the stories in the collection have to do with families destroyed not from within by alcoholism or repression or whatever, but from without, from drownings and car accidents.   I think a lot of parents do this, but I still can't help but think about all the horrible ways in which my daughter could be killed or maimed.  It's just something parents do in the back of their heads.  It doesn't color everything and it doesn't make me any more conservative in my parenting, but there's this constant notion that this creature you are charged with is just so fragile.  The realization didn't really come to the fore until some friends up the street, parents with a small child, were in Greece and they were in a car accident and the mother died—this was the basis for the story "Hairpin."  And I became interested in the way people grieve, and by that I mean grief about things as obvious as a death and grief about something less obvious as simply as your children growing away from you.  I realized I was really tired of the American style of grieving, which was sort of active and self-help, and I felt that people grieved in a totally different way. 

In "American Son" a young man defects to Russia, and I have to say there's a whiff of personal fantasy in there.   Have you ever spent any time in Russia?
No.  I've become great at writing about places I know nothing about.   There's one story in here in which a character goes and lives in Taiwan for several years, and I simply came to this fascination with Taiwan because I used to watch Taiwanese television on Sunday nights.  There was this one really weird gameshow on that I just didn't understand at all because I didn't understand the language, and the more I watched it the weirder it became.  And then I started watching other Taiwanese shows and it just became this place in myself.  Russia was always a place in my head because of literature, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev.  And that idea of a seventeen-year-old boy who defects to Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War, in 1974, was an idea I had when I was seventeen.  Because I was in love with literature, and I understood that if I became a writer in this country nothing much would happen, because it was like we had too much freedom.  You could play Pong or you could read books, it didn't really matter.  But in the Soviet Union, people put their lives on the line for literature, and I figured if I defected to the Soviet Union I'd be a star, an American high school student, and they'd love me and publish everything I ever wrote.  So I carried that fantasy around for years.

Most of these stories are grounded in California, or at least touch California at some point.  You mention Steinbeck in both books, and I know you're a fan of Joan Didion, but are there any California writers who are less well known who you like?
There's a Los Angeles writer named Eve Babitz who I love a lot.  And Kate Braverman is a California short story writer I really admire.  Stephen Beachy has written one of my favorite California novels ever, Distortion.  Robert Hass, the poet, is a terrific writer.  A lot of native Californian writing has come out of the Hispanic community. Jose Antonio Villarreal wrote this wonderful novel called Pocho about growing up in the Santa Clara Valley and that's a terrific book.  Raymond Carver is a California writer who I love, and even though most of his stories take place in fairly anonymous suburbs and apartment complexes, a good half of them do take place in California, and they are about a very particular California experience—people who are lower on the economic scale, people who are renting, people who came out here to find something but haven't hit it big or moved into the fast lane.  What I find odd about California as a place for writers is that so many writers come here from elsewhere, particularly in the Bay Area, and none of them write particularly about California or Northern California—they take on the mantle of the California writer but there are surprisingly few writers who are really concerned with how life is lived in California.  And that has always been a particular obsession of mine, because I'm from here and because I started with Steinbeck, and because I'm concerned with these notions of the mythology of California.  I really wanted to focus in these stories on San Francisco as a place—not the sort of glitzy, transported dot-com/Silicon Valley kind of life, but as the home of those people who just live here and live with the fog and know what that's like.

A.M. Homes

A.M. Homes's previous novels include Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, and she is the author of two short-story collections, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects.  She is a Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair, Bomb and Blind Spot and her work appears frequently in Art Forum, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Zoetrope. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Born in Washington D.C., she now lives in New York City.  We spoke both in person and by email following the publication of her most recent novel This Book Will Save Your Life.

What made you decide to set your new novel in Los Angeles?
It's the most American city in America right now—surrealistic, idealistic—the American Dream still thrives in LA, and it's a dense, culturally active place, very hard to know on the surface and fascinating if you can peel the carpet back and look under the floorboards.  I love it—wrote about it first in a non-fiction book called Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill

The new novel echoes several ideas from Music for Torching and some of your short stories, particularly this sense of being stuck, and of a peculiarly new-century panic and isolation.  An earlier generation of writers—I'm thinking of Bellow, Updike, Cheever, Roth—also wrote of a kind of personal and intellectual crisis, the need to escape conformity and social pressure. Would you characterize the crisis that Richard, your protagonist, goes through as something unique to our time?  How so?
Richard's crisis is unique to our time in that he lives in a time when some people, like Richard, can afford to be so isolated that they are not functioning anymore.  The artist David Smith talked about how no artist can create outside his/her time, and I think this is true.  My work is very reflective of the time we're living in... sometimes it seems to anticipate the time we're living in, as in, to see what's coming soon.  Columbine happened three weeks after Music For Torching came out... things in This Book Will Save Your Life came true within weeks of my turning the book in. As a writer I think it's about reading the culture, anticipating where we're going and even though it takes four to five years to write a book, if you're really doing you're job, you can still get there first.

But what is it about "stuck" characters that most fascinates you?
I'm interested in all of our "stuckedness."  We all have fantasies of who we want to be, how we want to be, how we want to cross, literally, the miles of this world, and what we want for ourselves.  And when you're very young, when you're twenty, you can absolutely do anything.  When you're thirty you can still do a lot of things.  But at some point this thing called middle age creeps in, patterns solidify, ways of living, obligations we've taken on.  People find it very hard to change even though they may want to.  And that's the stuckedness I'm interested in.  Do I want to sit at my desk writing novels for the rest of my life?  I'd love to run a huge corporation.  Is that going to happen?  I don't know.  That's the kind of stuckedness I mean.  It's right on the nose of that difference between fantasy and reality, that dissonance in the American Dream, where I'm probably most obsessed and fascinated.

I recently heard you say that humor is essential to serious discussion, that the funnier something is the more serious its subject is bound to be.  Discuss.
Humor cuts through the darkness, so I find people tolerate the depth—the seriousness—of something more if one deals with it in a funny way.  Also, honestly, life is so painful that you'd better make it funny otherwise you're just overwhelmed with grief.

Some have pointed out how seemingly out of character the optimism of of the new book is, or perhaps that it lacks your usual dose of darkness.  I'm not saying I agree with this, but how do you respond to that?  Have your aims as a writer evolved or shifted in some way in the last few years?
It's all written by the same person. if you go back and look at my first novel Jack, written when I was nineteen—some of the same themes, ideas, about taking responsiblity for yourself and being "a good citizen" appear there. The new book is not a departure, it's an evolution and it's truly much harder to write something that has a happy ending, than to wallow in the muck.

I've heard you say you are almost more interested in the visual than the verbal, and you've talked about your on-going interest in film and visual art.  Have visual artists affected the way you write prose?
I sure hope so... I think what's interesting is the way in which all artists, visual or verbal, develop a kind of vocabulary for themselves, whether a set of painting gestures, frequently used themes, words, or a kind of lighting.  But yes, I feed on the visual.  I think in pictures not words.

What are some favorite films?
Shoot The Moon, The Graduate, All The Presidents Men, The Candidate.... and any footage of the Rolling Stones.

Have you seen the film that was made of Cheever's story "The Swimmer," with Burt Lancaster roaming around Westchester in a Speedo?
Yes, and I don't think it was a Speedo. That was directed by Frank Perry who also made the classic 1962 film David and Lisa, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Play It As It Lays (based on Didion's book) and also Mommie Dearest.

I noticed you were listed as one of the judges polled for that New York Times Best American Novel of the Last 25 Years bit.  Will you tell us what you voted for and why?

Of course I won't tell you who I voted for.  All I'll say is that I am a huge fan of DeLillo, Roth, and Didion.

...in which the protagonist decides to be a late adopter of the blog firmament.

It's been a long time getting around to this, you see.  I stopped doing a radio show on WKCR-FM in New York about six years ago, and ever since I've wanted to get back to talking to writers about what they do and why.  I did a couple quickies for the Voice last year (such as this here), and I sort of dig the short-form interview (The Believer has the long form thing covered in their Writers Talking to Writers series).  So, in this space, on no particular schedule, look to find short-ish interviews with fiction writers who have something relatively new on the shelves.  I might also, very rarely, want to blabber about something I'm reading and why I like it so much.  That being said, I don't plan on doing any book reviews or synopses or ad hominem attacks.

Full disclosure: I'm a writer myself and one who believes that the novel never died, and that literary fiction isn't going the way of the 8-track anytime soon.  We live in a fickle culture in chaotic times and I think, wishful or not, good writing has never been so necessary.