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Michael Martone Interview

The Quarterly Conversation, ,

Originally published in the Summer 2008 issue of The Quarterly Conversation, Martone has published several more books in the time since this interview took place.

Michael Martone’s most recent books include Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins; Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft And the Craft of Art; Michael Martone, a collection of fake contributor’s notes; and The Blue Guide to Indiana. Quarry Press has also recently published Double-wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone, which includes five of his earlier books: Alive and Dead in Indiana, Safety Patrol, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, and Seeing Eye.

Martone’s work is hard to classify — Racing in Place reads like a series of experimental essay-like memoirs (or memoir-like essays); Michael Martone is a collection of fake contributor’s notes, except that they were all published as real, true contributor’s notes; The Blue Guide to Indiana includes tours for landmarks and attractions that don’t exist in Indiana, but should. Taken as a whole, Martone’s work doesn’t so much explode convention as expose it and then re-arrange it, as if literature were some vast modular housing structure, so that everyday when you came home from work, someone had re-arranged not just your furniture but the layout of the rooms, the architecture of the house, everything. Today you enter through the front door, tomorrow through the chimney.

— Barrett Hathcock

Barrett Hathcock: You write fiction that imitates nonfiction and nonfiction that at times resembles fiction. How are fiction and nonfiction different from you in terms of composition/approach? How are they different in terms of a reader’s expectations (as to what is or isn’t true)? (In Racing in Place, you write of Bob Knight: “There is a kind of slippage in the viewers’ perception that results in the registering of real horror, not its simulated aesthetic twin.” Is this slippage something to be lamented? Enjoyed? Pursued?)

Michael Martone: More and more, I think less and less of those kinds of differences. More and more I think of myself as a writer. Or as a maker of written things. Like this thing now. This interview. I think that finally we all have to sort and arrange and categorize and install what we come across in the world in order to order it. Order it to make sense of it. But I am less and less involved in that now. I will write something and allow others to make do, make due, make dew with it. That is one danger, I think, of the writer or artist in the university that is really nothing more than a massive sorting calculator of knowledge. My writing students enter a workshop to write but their main function over the 16-week semester is to function as critics for other writers’ writing. They may produce two or three stories over that time and have the stories talked about for maybe one or two hours in all that time. More often than not they are operating as sorters, assigning quality standards, assaying value and worth, labeling genre. It is work that has to be done but it is a dangerous habit to get into if you are wanting to be a writer. To distinguish. To sort. To even make sense of what one is doing before one is done doing it. So, I am hedging your question. I want to think of what I do as writing and let the speciation to others. Many artists draw, use watercolor, pain in oils, sculpt, construct, assemble, paste. They mix their media but it is all seen as art and issues of its fact or fiction seem beside the point to me. Well at least beside the point when the thing is in the making. I am in the fabrication business and there are different gradients on that scale of fiction and non-, I suppose, but none I worry about as I am doing them. I have a fiction in the voice of Dan Quayle who is writing an essay; a book about Michael Martone written by Michael Martone in the voice and form of his, Michael Martone’s, biographer; I have an essay in the voice of Michael Martone on the fictional creation of a character named Bobby Knight. To me the differences are in the details at a microscopic scale not at the much larger one of genre.

BH: Related to the first question, what do you make of the semi-recent memoir craze and the more recent false-memoir craze? Do you read memoirs? Do you have any observations about why these are so popular? What do you think the value of memoir is? Is there such thing as a true memoir? (Or are they examples of another kind of slippage?) (There seemed to be a lot of memoir in this book, and combined with Michael Martone, the two books formed not a definitive memoir but a sort of jazz-like theme/variation version of a “standard” memoir.)

MM: I do think of Racing in Place as a collection of experimental memoirs. The memoir’s problem is that it needs to find, to narrate a kind of death in order to make sense of life. I think of it, the constructed death, as a parentheses, an artificial parentheses, that the writer must draw around a life, or this part of life, to be able to stand outside of it and see it for what it is and isn’t. Hard to make sense of a train wreck that is still happening. So you have “childhood” as such a closed period. “My junior year abroad” is another. “My marriage” or “my divorce” — all this works I think. Memoir for me is always about also the act of memory, the drama of remembering. So, I guess, that is why there is such anxiety about the veracity of the memoir. If it is a function of memory, and it seeks to make sense of the fluid dynamics of a life still being lived, how could we expect it to be accurate in any real sense? The memory is a flawed instrument for record, as we know. Even though other residue of event, evidence of happening such as letters, news reports, photographs, tape recordings, witness statements, etc., can be faked, we certainly trust those more than our own memories. I guess I think the memoir’s real purpose is for the enactment of remembering, the performance of that. That is, I am not so much interested in event per se but in watching the individual writer write and, in writing, remember. My role as audience for the memoir is that of priest confessor or Freudian analyst. I like to attend as the writer surprises him or herself with what gets dredged up once one decides to remember. Freud was a great fiction writer. I would love to have invented the character named the Unconscious. What an invention! This fiction makes memoir possible. It is the drama acted out between a consciousness and its unconscious. How thrilling that so much of what you thought you were is hidden from you. We sit and watch that other side, that deeply buried other you come out and play. I guess in that sense it is all fiction, a staged drama of many possible and simultaneously running lives in one, none of them the “real” life, all of them, however, real.

BH: You have concentrated on Fort Wayne, Indiana, throughout your career; it’s this constant well of ideas and information. For example, I was delighted to learn that the Charlton Heston character from Planet of the Apes is from Fort Wayne. In the book you write, “In geometry, we know that a finite plane bounded on all sides still contains infinite points.” Do you ever run out of Fort Wayne ideas or worry that you might? Also, since you’ve lived much of your life not in Fort Wayne, what is it like writing about it from a distance (specifically writing about it from The South)? (I’m a bit interested in how writers as professional academics often end up living away from the places they write about, and I’m wondering how that affects the writing.) Also, in that same passage (page 100 of Racing in Place), you say, “the more tightly bounded, the more restricted a work is, the richer we find it.” How do you “bind”/organize/structure your essays (or your fictions, for that matter), when the conventional structure — a plot — isn’t used?

MM: Short answer is no, I don’t think I will run out of Fort Wayne–centric ideas. And I certainly don’t worry about it. The distance helps and hurts. My “Fort Wayne” is Fort Wayne of course. I am interested in the possibility of many Fort Waynes, of many Michael Martones. I like the notion of parallel dimensions, many trains running. The distance allows, well, for distance between realms, a buffer buffering. The great drama of America is between place and staying put and movement. To say you are a writer of “place” also implies you are a writer of and about moving. What makes Saturn Saturn? Sure, it is the gas giant planet but it is also the rings. The rings around Saturn are more Saturn than Saturn. As for structure when one abandons plot, one simply realizes that the structure of plot is simply an arbitrary collection of rules, suggestions, protocol. So you just find another set of arbitrary armature. Number. I often use numbers — the hours in the day, the weeks in a year. The number of planets. I am writing a whole book of short fiction now based on the number four. Fictions employing the four seasons, the four winds, the four corners, the four chambers of the heart, the four humors, the 4H Club, the Fab Four, the Fantastic Four, the four railroads on the Monopoly Board, Four Calling Birds. There is nothing natural or normal or elemental or essential in the structure we call plot — setting, vehicle, rising action, climax, dénouement, ending. All is artifice.

BH: How has teaching creative writing affected your own writing? In your students’ writing, do you notice trends or areas of interest that morph over time?

MM: I teach different kind of creative writing courses. Forms course and workshops. In both, I don’t pretend to know anything. I am not that kind of master teacher where I know something and transfer that knowledge to students who don’t know. Instead, I guess, I teach curiosity. I try to create in the classroom interesting environments and then, with the students, discover things that, perhaps, we already knew or know but didn’t know we knew. I think my other job as a teacher is really to resist the bias bred into the institution where I am housed. A university is by nature a critical institution. I want to resist having my students learn to be critics. Instead I want to inculcate the habit of writing and in doing so I think one has to defuse the tendency to judge quality of work, to even resist asking the question, “Does this work?” Students come to me ready to think of the classroom as a place of battle. They have already been naturalized into thinking that a workshop, say, is a simulation of the way the world works. You write something and an editor or reviewer beats up on it. So students have come to think of workshops as a way to create calluses, to out think the critics. Instead, I like to invite them to remember the intrinsic pleasures of the business, the act itself of sitting down and writing, not the ritual of self-sacrifice. My students’ writing have, for a long time, been quite timid and, as they love to say, traditional. The many classes many of them have taken have led them into an aesthetic that is by design static. The realistic narrative — once a highly experimental form — has produced a series of stylistic rules that can be taught and my students have learned — don’t use exclamation marks, underlining, or any graphic measure to intensify emotion, for example. Those kinds of rules are set in stone. What is to vary realistic story to story is the content, the local, the details. You can in that kind of aesthetic do things wrong. And the critical institution we work within loves that kind of knowledge. I have seen recently more and more students attempting fiction outside that particular drama. More interest right now in the fantastic, irreal, the magical. Also a growing interest in more things lyrical, meditative, associative, and less linear.

BH: For your nonfiction (or your fiction?), is the instigation for the writing a request from an editor or some publication, or do you think up the essay ideas first? Traditionally, “occasional writing” has been used in a pejorative sense, as in it’s not a writer’s “true” or “best” work. Do you agree with this? Any thoughts about this dichotomy?

MM: More often than fiction, nonfiction springs from a request from an editor, a prompt. The essay, “Racing in Place,” for example was the result of a request to contribute to an anthology called A Year in Place. Twelve writers were asked to pick a month and a place and write an essay about that connection. I got Indiana and the month of May. Most of the essays in the book Racing in Place were products of such requests, challenges, prompts, what have you. I do think that usually writers are self-prompting. They create first their own problems or sets of problems they then solve with their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc. So in that sense I feel that all writing is “occasional” in that it flows out of a particular set of circumstances created to create the work. I know what you mean about “occasional” being used to in such a way to diminish a piece. I think often we like to maintain this notion of complete parthenogenesis — that everything is the work of the solitary genius when, it seems, for me it is much more collaborative an enterprise. Much of my favorite work is “occasional,” derived from suggestions, musings, dares received from friends or editors — most of them friends — readers all. To switch it around for a minute: I have often in the past edited volumes of fiction or essays where I have come up with a writerly problem I hope is interesting to a writer I am asking to contribute to my anthology. Since often I cannot pay for the original work, I like to think an interesting challenge is a kind of remuneration. Writers like to work something interesting. I asked a group of Midwestern writers to write about the township square they grew up in — the township being a very visible part of the Midwestern landscape — and the results were stunning. Not one of the writers thought that his or her contribution was of a lesser order because he or she didn’t have the initial idea. Instead I think they were quite excited to make the idea into something special.

BH: Do you read blogs? What do you think of blogs? Does online publishing — or self-publishing — change what you do, or how would you start out differently if you were a young writer given this blogging, online self-publishing surge that is taking place?

MM: Are you kidding? This, this what is happening now, is revolutionary, profoundly revolutionary. The whole electronic apparatus is simply redefining who and what an “author” is. The categories of “book,” “editor,” “publisher,” “audience,” “reader,” are in flux at least if not collapsing, transforming before out eyes. Much was made of high literary theory’s pronouncement of the death of the author, but the paltry deconstruction that went on in a few English Departments was, is nothing to what is going on now with this machine — the one I am tapped into at this moment. Universities are, by nature, so conservative. My colleagues don’t get, don’t want to get post post-modernism. Meanwhile, their students, their children are in the midst of the real deconstruction of the entire culture and it has not, will not take place at the university but here out there. I love the way the web has worked around anything thrown at it, especially the desire of universities, publishing, etc., to re-impose the gates for gate-keeping of quality and the maintenance of hierarchy. Just work around it. The machine easily ignores it. The author is dead all right but long live writing. This is the end of the Johnsonian Age, the end of the Romantic, Modernist Individual Genius. I think that blogs actually are retrograde — the last attempt of the old-fashioned author to hold on to old-fashioned authorship. I think very soon blogs might evolve to the point where most will be unsigned or the same blog will be written by several people together or separately and also posted without a name of a shared name. The blog lives but the idea that it is written by any one person or consciousness will be so over. It is nothing but net baby. Out of many one. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.

BH: How did this book come together as a collection? It consists of pieces written over the past several years. Did you always envision them taking this form or is this incarnation of the book how things fell into place?

MM: I don’t think it was very conscious that way. I am a writer who, I think, likes to celebrate chance and accident and happenstance. No plan. I think of revision as not so much working drafts of the one story but that each new story is another draft of the one story I wanted to write. I liked to think that I write “trying” fiction, that my essays, “essay.” Everything I write is an attempt at getting at the something I am attempting to get at. I like collage for that reason. I can write a fiction, say. Made up of 24 sections of prose, and by cutting and pasting I can get many different permutation from the same piece of writing, gain different effects of juxtaposition in the changing composition. I don’t think I write or read for that matter with an idea of an ideal out there. I am not much for finding the best word, or the best order. I am more for all words in every order at once and all at once. I think this desire to plan, to have things come together in what is assumed to be the perfect way, the best way, is wrong for me. In that sense the metaphor of the workshop — asking if a piece “works” — makes no sense to me. Everything “works” in its own way. When I am finished with that one arrangement, I am on to the next one. The book is pretty much arranged in chronological order of the time of their writing. I am happy with that. I am not wedded to it. The truth is our existential reality of the media we use, language, is sequential, but I am not a slave to the linear nature I am working. I don’t really believe in progress — I don’t think I am getting better or worse. I’m just different moment to moment to moment.

BH: In Michael Martone, your book of contributor’s notes, and in the introduction to Racing in Place (not to mention The Blue Guide to Indiana), you call attention not just to the form of the writing but also its specific genre or context, and you play with the types of expectations a reader might have because of this context. Could you discuss how you came to this aesthetic point and where do you see it going next? Is there another text or context that you see is a fertile place to play and subvert in this way?

MM: When I was working in the English Department at Syracuse University, I began thinking about those things. Syracuse was the high tide of what is called “Theory” and its deconstruction of “English” and “English Departments” for that matter. It was there and then when everything, it seemed, in the world began to acquire “quotation marks.” Many of my colleagues who were creative writers at first were scared of these “scare” quoting manifestations. There were many fronts on which “Theory” was advancing, but probably the one most telling was along the lines of the “Death of the Author.” Many “authors” wanted to resist that. I found it interesting and came to think of theoretical writing as just another genre of creative writing in any case. I should have put those in quotes. Not to go on too long with this but the death of the author (and the less quoted following thought that writing lives) seemed to me to be about the making of meaning of a piece of work. Creative writing had always bestowed the making of meaning exclusively into the hands of the author. The then-current ideas questioned this and suggested that the reader too is involved in the making of meaning. To me this seemed incredibly liberating. A writer no longer needs to worry about such control. Instead, it seemed to me, the writer’s job became more that of an arranger of interesting environments that could be made available to the now very active reader. Or another way of thinking of it is that all of those categories — writer, reader, editor, critic, publisher — were now destabilized. I could be all of these things at once as the readers too could be all these things at once. You said it above. This was “play” in the sense that everything every time was to be re-invented. Nothing in this art, in this aesthetic is fixed — meaning in place or stable — or can be fixed — meaning to aspire to an ideal form. It seemed to me my job was to do just as you said above, to break open these fixed categories, expose them constantly for the constructions they are, and allow the reader to participate in the making of art, not simply its passive reception. Where is this heading? I think one line to follow is the actually disappearance of the signature. The author of a piece authoring the piece, maybe not truly anonymously, but without the audience of the piece really caring who the author is. In that way, the Internet is already deconstructing the “author” far better. So much of the Internet is “written” (you got to love those quotation marks) but who is its author?

Charles D’Ambrosio Interview

The Quarterly Conversation, ,

Originally published in the Winter 2007 issue of The Quarterly Conversation

Living Near the Wound: An Interview with Charles D’Ambrosio
By Barrett Hathcock

The following interview with Charles D’Ambrosio took place on October 2, 2007, in Birmingham, Ala.

D’Ambrosio is the author of two books of short stories, The Dead Fish Museum (2006) and The Point (1998), as well as two collections of essays, Orphans (2004) and Loitering: New and Collected Essays (2014).

Barrett Hathcock: These days, the vast majority of writers also teach, and because they’re in teaching as a profession, they tend to move around a lot, and I think it’s interesting how people have to move away from where they’re from and how that then affects their writing. They’re moving away to sustain a career and the writing refracts that in some way. But you grew up in Seattle and now live in Portland, and I was wondering how has that return to the west coast affected your writing? Because it seems like some of your stuff is so specifically tied to the west coast, but then some stories, like “Screenwriter” — it takes place in Manhattan . . .

Charles D’Ambrosio: But [it’s] always in the back of my mind. I mean, if I set a story in Manhattan, it’s probably some version of — I’m probably taking the weather. I’m dipping into that palette and putting rain there, and the rain I know is the rain in Seattle.

You know I’ve moved around some. I’ve lived in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and Iowa. Montana. I’ve bopped around a little bit but always for my own purposes, whatever [. . .] they were. I like being in the northwest. I like being close to family. I like being close to the people I know. It’s partly just personal. I have an American life so that means I have a very broken continuity — a fragile relation to my own history. And so the northwest represents the best chance I have of having a deep relation to place.

And also you know on some level, Seattle’s partly my wound. I want to be near it. Whatever that is, and I don’t know what it is, but I find it kind of important and exciting and vivid in a way I don’t find other places. Not to say — I mean, I love other parts of the country. It’s strange being down here because the narrative about the South and the narrative I’ve constructed about my life in America is a very different narrative. It’s western. It’s got a bit of Ellis Island and the Italian immigrant side. That kind of thing. But very different than down here.

Place matters a lot to me though, as a writer and as a person. I don’t know if it’s true or not but I feel like once I cross the Mississippi going west, I kind of know where I am. I lived in New York and Los Angeles, and I have to say that I understand Los Angeles better. I felt more at home. I understand getting in a car and driving two miles for a quart of milk, you know? And Manhattan was very interesting, but it was just too different for me. A place I like to visit but would not want to live there.

[…]

It’s interesting thinking about the South because I don’t know anything about it really outside of books, southern literature, and thinking about Seattle as a place, and place is very important to me, but it’s really because [Seattle’s] sense of place is tenuous because it doesn’t have the same deep history, and I imagine the sense of place in the South could almost be oppressive because of its thickness and the reality of the history.

Thomas McGuane has this quote — Out west you need a shovel to find history. It’s just nowhere available.

[…]

BH: So this is kind of a dork’s question, and the only reason I’m asking is because of “Drummond and Son,” which has so much great writing about typewriters. But and so, well: do you actually use a typewriter?

CD: I do. I mean, I use the computer too. I wouldn’t want anyone to have the impression that I’m like anti-, but I do. I’ve got tons of typewriters at home nobody wants. The main one I use now is an Olivetti — just like the story, an Olivetti Lettera 32. And actually I got the idea for that story after I’d been to my typewriter repair shop in Seattle getting that one cleaned. I got home and wrote a single-spaced page of notes for a story that I didn’t write for another three or four years but on that typewriter. But the typewriters I have are kind of a 50s and 60s, very usable, portable manual. But they’re not collector’s items so I get them for nothing. The Olivetti I got in Republic, Washington, for $1.99. Pristine. I don’t know why they decided it was $1.99 but they did. And they’re very usable.

BH: On the one hand I think it’s kind of a dorky question, but on the other hand, I think it’s actually really interesting, because I’m curious: How does that affect the actual composing?

CD: You know to me it’s the switching around. I also use a pencil and paper, and a pencil specifically, not a pen. I like the scratchiness of a pencil and the sort of delible quality. It’s not indelible. It’s not being put down for all time. And rather than turn around and erase, I just scratch stuff out. Its lack of permanence actually feels freeing. I do that a lot for dialogue. I like to arrange things with pencil on a sheet of paper, something off in the right hand corner and then down on the bottom — so you have a [spatial] change.

The same is true with a typewriter. I feel like with a computer you get into that left-to-write down into the void, that bottomless void, too easily, and I feel sometimes you think you’re writing but you just fall into word-processing tricks. But with the typewriter, I just roll a clean sheet in and you’ve got to start writing sentences. They’re not there on the page and you get into a rhythm and throw things down, and you don’t back space and delete. If you make mistakes or don’t like the sentence, you have to start writing it again. So I like the work of it.

I think of all those things as kind of layering into a story. A lot of the times if I get stuck, I turn to the typewriter, too. I do compose some on the computer, but if I get stuff, I’ll just kind of turn my back on that and just type and throw out things and not worry about misspellings and all that stuff that the computer tracks for you, but it’s annoying and distracting at the same time.

[…]

BH: You’ve written two collections of short stories and a collection of essays, so my perception of you before I met you was, That’s what he does. He’s a Short Story Guy. But you are now working on a novel and have worked on one previously, and I’m curious if the progression or transition between stories and a novel has been deliberate or simply more circumstantial?

CD: What happened is that I started writing something I realized that it wasn’t a short story. Really, I think among the many mistakes I’ve made over my life one of them was caring so much about the short story. I mean really until I went to an MFA program, I didn’t care about the short story. I had no prior interest in it. But then you’re in a program and the very format of the program is sort of biased in favor of the short story and against the novel or longer things. And you know, I think I maybe a little bit lost sight of my primary interests. I’m not primarily interested in the short story as a form. I never was. But I think I got steered in that direction and maybe that was one of the bad consequences for me [coming from] a MFA program.

[…]

One of the things I’ve done this time around in writing a novel is that I am treating it like I treat short stories. With a short story, I’ll work on it, change it, let it evolve. But I never feel like there’s some truth, some ideal form of that story that I have to be true to. It evolves. It evolves quite a bit. And if I pick it up a week or two weeks or a year down the road and start writing, I let it change in search of the story.

And I think with the [first] novel I kind of froze up and got kind of architectural like there’s some pre-existing form I had to measure up to or find and now I’m treating it more like a story and letting it change.

BH: But do you think the stories are at their ideal form now that they’ve been published and collected? Or is this just the point where they’re like fish and they’re caught and this is how they are?

CD: This is how they are, but some of the ones that I’ve rewritten and rewritten and rewritten off and on over the years, I know that if I had another whack at them, I’d probably start writing and change them again. 

[…]

With the short story, no matter how many drafts, I believe man once you write that first sentence, you are in the business of trying to shut it down. That’s how — and even though I write fairly long stories — I’m always thinking, How am I going to get all this in? I start thinking that right away. It’s like a dense ball of gas that just explodes but it’s right there in that first sentence to first paragraph. If it isn’t in that, then there’s no story as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe it’s partly because in a short story, you feel the whole thing inside you at once. I think a novel you look out, you see kind of a broad feeling, but some of the internal mapping of the story or how you progress from little point to little point is unknown to me, as I’m working.

BH: If you’re thinking about how you’re going to shut it down when you begin it, does that mean you know what the ending is?

CD: No, no. In fact, I don’t like to know what the ending is. Very often you have a provisional ending. You have an idea of a temporary ending. You just kind of erect this idea because you think you’re going in some direction. It usually changes. In fact I sort of have this thing where if I, at a certain point in the writing of it, if I see the ending, then by definition that’s not the ending. It gets eliminated as a possibility. It’s too conscious and I’ll start steering toward it and it’s too arranged. If I can see it that easily, then it’s not subtle enough. It’s not even worthy of being an ending. I have to be a little bit surprised by where it goes.

BH: That’s interesting, because a lot of your endings in The Dead Fish Museum initially frustrated me because of their open, unresolved quality.

CD: It’s one of the questions I pose to myself. There are times in certain stories [. . .] I was purposely doing that and I wondered to myself if that was the way to go. Some of the endings are really open-ended and all the tightness is in the first two-thirds, and then there’s this last couple of pages that are very, very unresolved. I don’t know. Well, life doesn’t resolve itself, but stories are different. But I was right in that place between how little can I do this, how open-ended can I be?

[…]

Am I doing something that’s right within the story or am I abandoning the story’s need? There are two endings to every story. There’s the one that’s the story, the tidy, and you could push it toward a morality, but then there’s the need to resolve it aesthetically and my question is: I don’t care about resolving the tidy moral life of a story, but did I end it aesthetically?

BH: I was curious about the amount of restraint in the stories. There’s no formal self-consciousness, and the prose doesn’t reach for extravagance, though that’s not to say that the prose isn’t beautiful in places.

CD: You know, I would never do that in a short story. For instance in my essays, in my book of essays, a lot of the writing in there is slightly show-offy and people have asked me, Why don’t you write your stories like your essays? And the essays, they’re obviously me in a way, and I’m just stepping out, but in a short story it would just seem undignified.

In the stories, at a certain point only the story matters and everything serves it and I find myself in the latter stages just subservient to what’s there. Like in “Drummond and Son,” at one point in looking over and editing that story it referred to the boys having to put down their dog or give it to the pound, and I had given the dog a name and the dog’s name was Pookie, and it was a little bit of a jokey name and I just kept reading it and thinking, You know what? I’ve got to pull that name out. Because it’s a little joke I was having [with] myself in the moment of composition. I was going to give it a silly name, and I didn’t want any of that story to seem clever or self-conscious. But just a little thing like that. Would a reader ever know? Maybe not. Probably not. It’s just a story. [. . .] I pulled that name out. I knew it was slightly self-conscious. You start serving the story. That’s all that matters.

Flannery O’Connor says somewhere in Mystery and Manners that you kind of have to absent yourself in order to see more clearly the thing that needs to be seen — the writer does.

[…]

In the short stories — if I can make a very lumpy contrast — in the shorts stories, I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face some thing; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays, I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart. So in the short stories, I want have such a deep drive to have things come together, and in the essays I have an equally strong desire to make things fall apart. Whether it’s political understandings or moral understandings that seem readymade and seem too pat or too easy, even by good-thinking people, you know. I like taking on public issues.

[…]

The accent in the essay might be: This is how I figure out what I’m thinking. In a story: this is how I feel out what I’m feeling. Just slightly different emphasis.

BH: I read that your wife is in a band and plays drums, and so I was curious about music and its relation to stories. I think it was in the 2004 Best American Short Stories, the one from 2004 that Lorrie Moore edited and which includes “Screenwriter.” She has this bit in her intro where she says that short stories are similar to songs; they have the same sort of interests in compression and carrying emotion, and I was just wondering if — being married to a musician — do you see any relation between songs and stories or music and stories, or is it a separate animal?

CD: Yeah, you know, I’m so musically illiterate. I can’t hold a tune. I can barely sing “Happy Birthday.” But I always loved music. Short stories are like a song certainly in the writing. I work a long time to get the sound right, and I feel a lot of time until I get that sound right — it’s the sentence by sentence sound — that I can’t go forward in the story, that actually the sound contains a good part of the narrative, and it won’t unlock until I find the note. And also I think short stories, like songs, have an associated feel. That’s me now speaking as a reader. There’s certain stories that I can just turn to even though I’ve read them a dozen times, I want to have that feeling, like you’d turn on some oldies song or some song you’d listen to in college.

For short stories, the experience is different. A friend of mine pointed this out to me. Tom Grimes, a writer and teacher who runs a program down in Texas. He said, I went into class and asked everybody: Who are your favorite characters in literature? And of course people say Nick Caraway or whatever . . . I don’t know. And then he says, What’s common there? Everybody’s like quiet. And he says, None of them are from short stories. Name a character from a short story — No one can. You never can. I mean there are some. Johnny Hake, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” John Cheever. There are a couple that you can name, but you don’t remember them. And that’s not what’s important. And it’s partly the music that’s important, it’s maybe the narrative, but it’s not the character. Lorrie Moore’s a great example in “The People Like that Are the Only People Here” — they don’t have names. You don’t need them for the short story to come alive. We participate, we sync into it in a different way. Just like a great song, you almost don’t need the lyrics.