Alan Heathcock

Heathcock, who teaches writing atBoiseState, said he wrote VOLT over 12 years. He answered these questions by e-mail earlier this month.

How long have you been working on the stories in VOLT, and for how long have you had in mind the connections of place and characters of Krafton? Did you start with the notion of writing stories about this place, or did that unity emerge as you wrote the stories?

I started writing about the town of Krafton way back in the late nineties, just because I was drawn to the landscape—I’ve always found something mysterious and curious about rural landscapes, the crops and woods and openness. I quickly discovered the dramatic advantages to working within this setting, the isolation of characters forcing them into a kind of contemplation that allowed me to investigate certain themes. The unity of which you speak is, I think, in part due to the themes investigated within the place. The stories come back, again and again, to look at the invasive nature of violence and the tenuous nature of peace, of how community—both secular and religious–enable or disable these things. Because I kept hitting on questions of justice and faith I found the two main characters, Sheriff Helen Farraley and Pastor Vernon Hamby, kept appearing.

At some point, just for the sake of verisimilitude, I had to take an accounting of who ran what stores in town, where everyone lived, what crops were in what fields, and so forth. As a practical matter, once the place became fully realized in my imagination I found the people became more real, too.  Once I reached that point, had created a place and people as real in my imagination as Chicago (where I grew up) or Boise, Idaho (where I now live and call home), I saw no reason to write about anywhere else, or about any other characters. Finally, as I wanted to write a book about America, and not just about Indiana or Idaho or Minnesota, I never say in the book where Krafton is located. The homogeneity of rural America works in my favor here, as reviewers/readers from the west, Midwest, High Plains, south, and northeast, have all at some point claimed Krafton as their own. And, of course, they’re all right.

What’s the life cycle of a typical story for you? How does it move from first idea to final version, and how long does that usually take, and how winding a path is it?

It varied from story to story. The shortest amount of time it took to write one of the stories in VOLT, from start to finish, was probably around a year, while the longest took five or six years. I worked on the book for over a dozen years, and my process has drastically changed over that time. Ten years ago, when I strongly believed I must write a certain number of words every day just to earn my keep, I would pick a character, have a vague understanding of their situation, and then just follow them around, hoping that cool things happened. Often they didn’t. Eventually, I would have to gather up all that wandering and figure out if I had anything of value. Many times I’d come away empty-handed.  In fact, five of the stories in VOLT came from the rubble of two novels I was writing about Krafton, which ultimately failed because I followed the characters and their wending stories into an abyss of nothingness. So not quite empty-handed, but I had to work hard to salvage stories from the scraps of the failed novels. I’m also aware that the rubble-stories worked out well for me, while still realizing I maybe needed to work smarter, better.

Now I’m much more deliberate. I try to understand what I’m writing before I begin. I realize for many writers this would mean death to creativity, and stand for some sense their imaginative freedom being diminished. I don’t see it that way. Instead of typing out what’s in my mind’s eye, I follow the characters, in their storylines, in my imagination, seeing where they go. If I find they’ve gotten somewhere of value, then I task myself to going to the keyboard and finding the words to accurately depict the precise and meaningful truths I’ve already imagined. It’s the difference between improvisation and acting. I’m more of an actor now, my words being the expressions and mannerisms to communicate the content of the performance I know I must give to properly imbue the reader with empathy. My days are filled with me trying, as much as I can, to work things right in my imagination before I set to writing a word. To do this correctly, it takes time. Or it takes me time. I take notes, draw pictures, watch movies, read other books, go have a particular experience, all to help my imagination find its way wholly into a moment’s truth. I used to always wish I could write faster. Now I embrace the process, and only concentrate on writing things of value (and not writing just for the sake of some silly notion that I must write a certain number of words a day to quality for my author card). I produce fewer words these days, though more that matter.

I understand that Krafton is not based on any particular place, but I’m wondering – as a native of Idaho – what you think living in Boise has done for your writing. Has Idaho added any particular elements to Krafton?

Not particularlyBoise, as it’s a bigger town and pretty cosmopolitan when compared to Krafton, butIdahohas helped me understand a new depth of isolation, for both good and bad, and an openness that’s both peaceful and profound. Years ago, I was working on the story “The Staying Freight” when I went backpacking in the Frank Church Wilderness area. In that story, after my main character accidentally kills his own son in a farming accident, he goes through a terrible transformation, turning into a man-creature who has, in ways both literal and metaphoric, separated himself from the civilized world. I was struggling to capture the insights of grief I needed for that story to become relevant, but then, high up on a big outcropping of rock, overlooking a pristine mountain lake, I felt more alone than I ever had before. I could scream and nobody would hear me. I could flail and wail and howl at the sky, and it wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone but myself. I then understood this man’s problem wasn’t that his wife and the community wouldn’t forgive him, but that despite all his flailing and wailing he couldn’t move away from himself, couldn’t forgive himself.  I sat on that rock crying, staring down over the lake, all alone, and thought about the nature of forgiveness. For me, for my story, it was a profound moment, and one I don’t think I could’ve had back in Chicago (or hadn’t yet had, at least). This is just one of many anecdotes I could tell, but my point is that Idaho is built for contemplation. If you want to remember what it means to be human, as a pioneer really knew what it meant to be human, in ways that are different from the misunderstandings we often embrace because of the easy lives we largely take for granted, then drive an hour in any direction out of Boise, and out there you’ll find the truth.

I’ve read that film is an important influence for you. Are there any movies whose narrative style has affected the way you tell stories?

Film has had a huge influence on my writing, not just in narrative style, and films like Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light and Polanski’s Knife In the Water, Tender Mercies and The White Ribbon and There Will Be Blood, to name a few, are as important to me as an artist as most books. But to answer your specific question, there was one film that directly influenced the narrative style of one of my stories. I was working on the story “Peacekeeper”, which has a series of events made up of three different narrative threads from three different time periods. At first, I had it all written out chronologically, like three chapters, each chapter with its own rise and fall. But I was troubled by having three different climaxes in three different parts of the story. I didn’t feel as if the narrative was accumulating urgency, but simply peaking and plummeting, peaking and plummeting…  Then I saw the Christopher Nolan film Following, which follows several different narrative threads, jumping from scene to scene to scene, out of chronological time, each from a different time period within the story, mixing past and present, and accumulating a momentum toward the revelation of all these seemingly disparate pieces coming together. As soon as I saw that film, I knew I would employ that non-linear form of storytelling, and though it took some negotiation to get it right, I was pleased with the result. I solved the problem of how to have these big events, from different times within the story, all three climaxes, all peaking at the story’s end. In short, I take film seriously. Every film, like every book, like every play and TV show and painting and opera and ballet, I try and learn something, if possible, about the execution of the art and craft of storytelling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpUSZH9tEJs

It seems rare that a good movie is made of a good novel. Do you have any novel-movie pairs that you like – cases where both are successful?

There are a lot of the classic obvious ones like To Kill a Mockingbird and Grapes of Wrath, Truman Capote’s and Richard Brooks’ versions of In Cold Blood, The Innocents matched with Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, the Peter Brook version of the William Golding novel, Lord of the Flies.  Several plays made into films: Equus, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Crucible, to name a few.  Several films and books associated with Larry McMurtry (Hud, The Last Pictureshow, Lonesome Dove). The John Boorman film of the James Dickey novel, Deliverance.  Here’s a few that might be a step or two off the beaten path: Woman in the Dunes, book by Kobo Abe, film by Hiroshi Teshigahara; Black Robe, book by Brian Moore, film by Bruce Beresford, Winter’s Bone, book by Daniel Woodrell, film by Debra Granik, and The Butcher Boy, book by Patrick McCabe, film by Neil Jordan.

I’ve seen that you’re a fan of Cormac McCarthy’s, and his work and your work are both described sometimes in terms of “darkness” – though it isn’t merely dark or without hope, necessarily. What is the artistic purpose of closely considering violence or death or grief, or any of the other varieties of harrowing human experiences? Why do you think you find yourself interested in these experiences, artistically?

I find myself drawn to these subjects artistically because they are my greatest preoccupations as a human being. They are my greatest preoccupations because of things I’ve seen, things in which I’ve been in close proximity, stories told, family history, genetics, personal neurosis, and a whole laundry list of specifics that would need to either be sorted out in therapy or addressed in art. I’ve chosen the latter. When I write, I’m first just writing for myself. There are questions I need answered. Things I need to face. Or, maybe in more accurate terms, I can say that writing stories, searching for answers, digging out insights from the muck of my own fears and confusions, gives me, in a small way, a sense of control over a world that often feels unhinged. The highest purpose of art, as I understand and practice art, is to allow us to look at ourselves in a way that’s bearable. Art is reality put into a package, an order, even if the art itself is a perfect representation of the chaos that is violence and fear and greed and all the other evils that seem to confound and plague the human kind. When I peer into the darkness, I’m not some teenager snickering while burning up his sister’s dolls and listening to Megadeth. I take this stuff seriously. The only assurance I can give is that I’m not writing about tragedy and grief to entertain you, or myself.  If and when I peer into the darkness, my greatest hope is that I find some glimmer of light. Truly. Writing is an act of hope. Regardless, I see my job as to only capture, via the written word, precisely what I see, and nothing more, and nothing less.  Because I know anything more or less won’t matter, the way Chicken Soup For the Soul doesn’t matter because it’s snake oil, because it does nothing for the soul.  Here’s what I know: when I’m lying in bed at night and I can’t sleep, and the ghouls of harrow come to feast on my spirit, the only way to stave them off is with the truth. To write is to arm myself against ghouls. How do I know I’ve been honest? That I’ve looked, unflinching, and captured truth? I’m very proud to say that I sleep well these days.

Here’s a McCarthy geek question: You once said you consider The Road a perfect book. I like that book, but I love Blood Meridian, and the two works seem like poles of McCarthy’s style in a certain way – running the gamut from his most terse to his most expansive, in terms of prose style, and in terms of how much hope he allows into these worlds. I’d love to hear your thoughts along this line – why might you prefer The Road, if you do, and how to you feel about McCarthy’s other work?

I love all of Cormac McCarthy’s books, and depending on the day or month or what I had for dinner, I may say Blood Meridian was his greatest novel, or Child of God, or The Crossing or Outer Dark or The Road.  I believe, for me, The Road is a perfect book because the substance and style are in concert in perfect execution. It’s a book that made perfect sense to me, made me see the world differently and clearer, made me imagine things I’d never seen or touched, with great depth, and touched me with the intensity of actual experience. I believe Blood Meridian is also a perfect book, for the same reasons, though with different specifics. Just so it doesn’t sound like I’m being too generous, I could, if I wanted, which I don’t, go into greater academic justification for my beliefs. I just find that stuff kind of boring. Really, and not to be snotty, I don’t sit around dwelling on these things. Folks have these discussions at cocktail parties about which book is his best and worst and why and…  These discussions get all heated and crazy.  When I say something like, “I don’t really have a favorite”, folks get pissy. “But you must decide!” they demand. I also realize that this interview is supposed to be, in a way, a virtual cocktail party, and I’m being a lousy guest. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally stoked when I hear a group of people talking as passionately about books as folks back in Chicago talk about sports. As for McCarthy, what’s important to me is that I’ve found an author who seems to share my preoccupations, and whose aesthetic makes sense to my intellect and imagination, and who has created a language that has helped me face themes in my own writing, and whose books both challenge and inspire me into ambition. I read his work and think that I can and must do better. All of his work does that for me. So why the hell would I care to choose one book over another? To me, it’s like asking which food group I prefer, and if an August peach is really better than fresh loaf of bread. I love both, and I can go to the store and get both, and therefore see no sense in discussing the merits of one over the other.

Are there any authors for whom you have undergone an absolute about-face – from hating to liking, or vice versa – when re-reading them years later?

In a couple of weeks I’m set to visit Montana, and though this may get me in trouble I used to really love A River Runs Through It, which on a recent read didn’t hold up as well (except for the last couple of pages, which still hold a great deal of beauty). James Joyce was tough for me as a younger man, but now The Dubliners is a book I read again and again. While not a complete about-face, I now clearly see that Stephen King is very talented in certain limited but important ways, and very flawed in others. I always thought of The Exorcist as a cheap-thrill book, and yet found it pretty amazing on a recent read. I think there are a lot of writers I’ve had to get a bit older, and a bit more mature, to appreciate, writers like William Maxwell and Peter Taylor and Walker Percy, while others have lost their youthful charm. Probably the biggest about-face, which I’m guessing isn’t uncommon, is that I found Shakespeare hard to stomach back in college, but now find his work endlessly inspiring and powerful. I’m working on a novel right now, about war and politics and human suffering, and I’m coming to Shakespeare’s plays like I’m a starving man and Shakespeare is the feast.

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Here’s an early Halloween treat: Heathcock’s NPR essay on the ghost stories of Algernon Blackwood.

To read past interviews in this series, go here.

Matt Bell

Bell is the author of the collection How They Were Found, a forthcoming novella, Cataclysm Baby, and the chapbooks Wolf Parts, The Collectors and How the Broken Lead the Blind. He’s an editor at Dzanc Books, and he edits the literary magazine The Collagist. He teaches writing at theUniversity of Michigan.

He answered these questions by e-mail.

You tweeted recently that you just finished some novel revisions that have occupied almost two years. Could you describe the nature of the revision and however much about the project you’re comfortable with? Have you been reworking plot and character elements, or focused more on language and refining expression? Or some combination?

The first draft of the novel took about ten months: I don’t outline, or plan ahead, and in fact sort of actively work to keep myself from looking further ahead than the scene I’m writing—and ideally no further than the sentence or the paragraph. So the first draft—which actually comprised any number of revisions over each passage, as I write forward, then back up, then revise forward to the edge again—was the best I could do by that method, but I knew it needed a lot of work.

I put it aside for a month or so, and then when I came back I sat down and read through the whole thing again, this time making a plan to revise by. What I ended up with was a ten-thousand-word “narrative outline,” just sort of a long-form summary of everything that actually happens in the novel. Of course, this wasn’t necessarily what happened in the first draft, but rather what I wanted the second draft to contain.

Once I had this, I typed the entire novel again, adding and revising and remaking it from what it was into what I wanted to be. I have two monitors, so I put the old draft on one, and an empty Word document on the other, and I just started over, using what I could out of the old draft, deleting what I couldn’t, and adding what I needed. So as the right monitor’s document filled up, the left monitor emptied—and over the next five months, I rewrote the book, and actually ended up expanding it quite a bit, so that it actually doubled in size.

This was the first draft I felt good about, that I probably could have asked someone else read. But I didn’t. Instead I took another month off, and then went back to work. At this point, it was much more the sentence-level revisions, along with a few remaining larger concerns—but nothing like the wholesale restructuring of the second draft.

By this third phase, I had gone from working on the book three or four hours a day to working on it six or eight, and this draft took me three or four months to finish. Of course, it wasn’t a pure working from end to end process: I can’t tell you how many times I revised each part of the book. Dozens, maybe. I did probably one hundred drafts of certain, troublesome passages, most of which eventually got cut anyway, because of course they were always going to be flawed—it just took me two years to learn to let them go.

What kind of a reviser are you, generally? Are you a taker-outer, or a putter-inner?

My process tends to end with quite a bit of cutting, but obviously I do both, depending on the situation. Generally, my first drafts tend to be a little sketchy, missing an element or two the story needs to run right, but after that’s fixed by adding a couple scenes or passages, then later drafts tends to shrink as they go.

What kind of a first-draft writer are you? Do you go fast and expect to come back and make repairs, or try to get it as right as you can right away?

I try to get it as right as I can the first time out, but—especially because I’m not planning beforehand, or even starting from an idea other than the tiniest bit of inspiration, a sentence or a sound or an image or whatever—I don’t usually actually get it right. In revision, I tend to do dozens of passes through a story before I’m done, continuing to keep making it better from end to end. So I guess I’m always trying to do the best job I can, but still knowing I’m probably going to have to do it again.

How does the work’s size – whether it’s a story or a novella or a novel – influence revision? Is it just the same process at different scales, or is there something fundamentally distinct about revising a story versus a novel?

This was one of the areas of greatest stress with the novel: I’m the kind of person that might do fifty full end-to-end revisions of a short story. So how to take that same process—which has generally been successful—and apply it to something as large as the novel? What I found was that—at least once the heavy lifting of the second draft was over—was that I could mostly revise as I always had, working first in thirty or forty or fifty page chunks, and then through the book as a whole, just going over and over a passage, word by word, sentence by sentence, as many times as it took to get it right. The only real difference was that to keep as much of the whole in my head as I could required me to work many more hours a day than I had before—eventually double or triple what I’d worked on my longest days as a short story writer, as I neared the end of the last draft.

I wonder how your work as an editor and your work as a writer influence each other. Do you consider yourself, first or foremost, one or the other?

I’m definitely a writer first, but I’d still say that more and more I think of what I do as living a literary life: I spend most of my time writing or reading or editing or teaching writing, and there’s a lot of crossover between these things. It’s at least conceivable that there could come a day when I no longer write, but still do everything else. It wouldn’t be the worst thing. But let’s hope that’s a long way off still.

As far as how they influence each other: Editing is, for me at least, a task that uses most of the same muscles as writing my own work, with the additional need to be mindful of not trampling the writer being edited—my job is to help them achieve their goals more fully, not to get in their way or take their work away. But it’s a great benefit to get to work closely with someone else’s prose: It’s helped me see mine more clearly, and certainly works I’ve edited have helped show me solutions in my own work.

Dzanc has published a lot of good work in a relatively short time, and gotten a lot of well-deserved attention as a kind of new path for publishing. What have you learned about that state of publishing and literature through your work at Dzanc and editing The Collagist that you might not have known beforehand?

The big thing that Dzanc and The Collagist have introduced me to is less a “what” and more a “who”: I’d already met a lot of great writers before starting The Collagist and then joining Dzanc, but obviously both of these jobs has increased that number exponentially. There are so many great writers working today, and my work has put me into contact with them in ways I really appreciate, whether it’s reading their submissions, accepting their work, or editing their books with them. It’s a constant reminder of how high the bar is for new literature, and also how many people are working their hardest to reach it. It both pushes and encourages me as a reader and a writer, and I couldn’t me more thankful for that kind of constant reminder.

What works are you really excited about right now?

It’s always hard to narrow it down, but I feel like I’ve been reading a lot of great books this year, of all different sizes and shapes. Here’s a brief list of new books I’ve been finding myself talking about: John D’Agata’s About a Mountain. Dawn Tripp’s Game of Secrets. Patrick Dewitt’s The Brothers Sisters. Robert Kloss’s How the Days of Love & Diphtheria. Hooked by John Franc. Edouard Levé’s Suicide.

But really, there’s so much good work out there—I’m reading as fast as I can, whenever I can, and I know I’m barely scratching the surface of what’s being published. There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the air in the general press about literature, and maybe there are good business reasons for that take on the industry. But creatively? I think maybe things have never been better. There are so many strong and vital aesthetics and movements in play right now, and surely more on the way. I can’t wait to read what happens next.

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Check out Matt’s web site here. For past interviews in this series, go here.

Here’s a passage from Horrocks’ Bark interview, addressing the differences between writing a novel versus a short story:

“The main difference is that I have no clue what I’m doing on the novel. There was a point that I felt that way with stories, of course, but I’ve had years, practice, lots of good workshops and good readers, to help me figure things out. I haven’t decoded the form, but it’s a forest I’m used to hacking my way through.

“My novel project feels like a jungle without any clear paths at all. I don’t know which plants are poisonous or which animals might eat me. There are weird noises in the distance. I don’t have the right kind of shoes. It’s always raining, and I’d like to cower under some leaves and just research forever, but I know I have to step out, start tromping, and get muddy.

“I heard the writer Peter Ho Davies refer to a story as a rock that you could cup in your hand: hold it up to the light, feel the whole shape of it at once. The novel was a giant boulder you could only walk around, seeing small slices of it at a time. I like this image a lot. I just need to keep reminding myself that I can get around the whole rock that way, with more steps and more patience. And through the jungle? Picture the rock in the jungle. Then it all fits.”

Here’s the entire interview.

Here’s a passage from Orozco’s interview:

“When I teach a fiction writing class the one unit/topic I skip is “theme.” I went to Catholic school when I was a boy, taught by nuns who would teach theme. They’d walk around the room and ask “What’s this story about?” and you’d answer and they’d say “No, wrong.” So you’d offer another answer and they’d say “Close!  But no.” And so, theme was a like this one key they held in their hand, and if you guessed the right theme, you would have the key to unlocking the story.

“I’ll tell a student that story is experiential, not thematic, that story engages via human action and reaction, not via idea. I’ll tell her not to write about, say, the plight of the elderly on America, but to write instead about the summer her grandfather fell down the stairs and broke his hip and had to move in with her family. I’m belaboring this point, I guess: that for me, what a story is about arises from what happens in it. A writer works on a story every day for months, with the primary goal of telling a human story that engages emotively. Doing just that–immersively, ongoingly, daily–the preoccupation or theme or worldview will emerge unbidden.”

Read the full interview here.

Congrats to both.

Ben George, editor of Ecotone

Ben is a graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA program. He was an editor at Tin House before leaving for Ecotone, a journal that’s established a high bar for excellence in its short history. Lookout, its book-publishing partner, recently published Edith Pearlman’s “Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories,” to great acclaim.

Ben graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

How do you edit a story or piece of writing – how do you go about discovering how it might be improved? How do you manage the trick of suggesting significant changes, while making sure the author retains the sense of creative control?

I’ve heard writers say that much of what they learn while working on a novel does them no good when it comes time to write the next novel, because each novel presents its own unique obstacles, its own demands for how it needs to be written, thereby cruelly rendering useless some of the things that were learned on the last book. To some extent, the same might be said about editing. The “how” question is tough, then, because to be a good editor, meaning to hope to be of any use to the writer, you need to approach each piece of writing fresh. I’m overfond of the verb suss in this context—you suss out the particular intentions and pleasures of a story or essay. (I do this with the poems we publish as well, but I make suggestions less often on poetry.) It’s like very gratifying detective work. You’re trying to get to the heart of the mystery about this story and how it’s been conceived and made by the writer. Until you know that, you can have no real sense of whether and where it might be improved upon. Usually the first time through a story I’m just having a conversation with it, making little notes to myself about what I think it’s doing and why.

My model of editing is built on the belief, which I think most of us share, that no writer ever fully achieves his vision for a piece of writing. So every beautiful story—even “Sonny’s Blues,” even “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—is in some respects a glorious failure. We think of Shelley’s notion that the artist’s mind is a fading coal when he’s writing. It possesses only “transitory brightness” because, as Shelley puts it, “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline.” At the same time, I always imagine that there might be some Platonic ideal of the story, some way it wants to exist in an ideal form if it could attain it. It never will, of course. But my goal is to help the writer get the story as close to this ideal as possible. The trick is to vanquish ego, and to make sure you’re trying to reach the story’s ideal form, and not your ideal form for it as the editor. That can be difficult. You can’t get rid of your biases entirely—proclivities and preferences that you have as a reader, and perhaps as a writer yourself—but you try to bring to the editing process just your taste and your awareness of whatever the story’s designs on you are.

The business of suggesting significant changes to a story is both hard and not hard. It’s not hard on the one hand because if I have accepted a story for publication, I never insist upon any of the changes I’ve suggested, whether they are larger concerns or down at the level of the line. The decisions are the writer’s to make, so in my editing process the writer does retain complete creative control. On the other hand, it can be hard because the writer is letting you into the delicate ego shop, the place where the work gets created, where insecurities sometimes abound. Even if the piece isn’t autobiographical, there’s a good deal of the writer’s soul in it. As Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”

So you do well as an editor to tread lightly, to justify the writer’s trust in you. You do that in part by trying to read the story more closely than any sane person ever would. The hope is that you show the writer how seriously you’ve considered her art and how deeply you’ve thought about the story. In my experience most writers are very hard workers. They’re artisans. And since the story is shortly to be presented to numerous readers, they would like for it to be superior. If you’ve been successful as an editor and they can see that your suggestions are to the good, they’re usually only too happy to accept them. Besides, I think a fair portion of the editing I do allows writers to re-engage with their stories and essays in ways that are rewarding to them. What I mean is that while I don’t hesitate to suggest cuts if I think compressing or trimming a certain passage will serve a piece overall, just as often I’m asking the writer for more, for amplification, for clarification. Unless there’s a danger of insulting the reader through over-explanation, writers usually enjoy honing their stories in an “adding” fashion. I ask “why” and “how” a lot. Sometimes too much—but that’s better than not enough. Most writers are familiar with John Gardner’s conception of the story as dream. Unless you’re writing metafiction, and interrupting and interrogating the reader’s experience of the story is part of your goal, you don’t want to do anything that jars the reader from the dream of the story and reminds him that he’s reading. If there are places where the editor can help the writer address that danger, the writer is usually eager to do so.

In the end it’s always up to me to earn the trust of the writer. If I haven’t done that, then I think the writer should invoke what Nabokov once referred to as a “thunderous stet.” I never want a writer to make a change that he isn’t comfortable with.

What are the essential qualities of a good editor? And what sorts of editorial mistakes have you made that you’ve learned from?

A combination of sympathy for the writer and rigor on behalf of the reader may be the defining quality of a good editor. Can you balance those as an editor? That’s the question. Be the most sympathetic reader imaginable for the writer, trying at every turn to honor her intentions, yet always politely insisting that the work live up to its own highest standard.  

This is a responsibility I take seriously, because I’m trying in effect to be an Everyreader. I’m trying to consider simultaneously my own reactions to and feelings about a piece of writing as well as what these reactions and feelings will be for another reader out there. So I’m working imaginatively on behalf of the writer, giving him a perspective that is outside his own brain.

The mistakes I make are too numerous and ongoing to catalog effectively. One kind of mistake is obvious. You turn down a piece of writing that gets published elsewhere and later goes on to be celebrated. I rejected a story while an editor at Tin House that was later included in Best American Short Stories. I did so with a lengthy note, etc., but I turned it down nonetheless. At Ecotone we turned down an essay a couple of years ago that I just learned will be reprinted in Best American Essays later this year. Ultimately this doesn’t bother me a whole lot. My taste is all I have to go on, and so I have to trust it. And this is just an encouraging sign for writers. It shows that if you have a good piece of writing, no editor is the final arbiter. I believe that fine work will always be recognized and published, and will find its readers. Literary art as a whole will never suffer due to my short-sightedness, which is a relief, as is the fact that every editor inadvertently passes on strong work from time to time. The Atlantic’s fiction editor, C. Michael Curtis, admits to turning down Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” now one of the most anthologized stories in recent American literature. The New Yorker unaccountably turned down a masterpiece by Yiyun Li called “Prison,” which Tin House published, and then the story won an O. Henry. And so on.

Other kinds of mistakes are harder to detect, and probably have to do with occasions where I was too blunt with a writer or pushed too hard, and wasn’t successful in doing what I suggest above that an editor should do, namely, efface himself in the service of art. On the one hand I want readers to be disabused of the notion of the artist birthing from her inner self a piece of writing whole and finished. It just doesn’t work that way very often. Many of our greatest works of literature have been edited into existence. Look at The Waste Land. Eliot is an unqualified genius, but the poem wouldn’t exist without Pound. (And thank God it’s not called He Do the Police in Different Voices, which was Eliot’s original title for it, and that it starts with one of the most memorable lines in all of poetry—“April is the cruelest month”—which initially didn’t occur until the second page.) Look, too, at Maxwell Perkins’s influence on Fitzgerald’s writing of The Great Gatsby (the famous ending passage we all think of about beating on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past—that was originally somewhere in the middle of the book, I think; and in the first draft Perkins saw, Gatsby was a far cry from how he was later developed). Or at how much Perkins helped Thomas Wolfe pare down his tomes.

But on the other hand the reader doesn’t want to be reminded of this effort while reading. It infects the experience of the art. When he was interviewed by the Paris Review, the editor Robert Gottlieb—who published Catch-22 and a lot of other famous books, as well as edited the New Yorker for several years—mentioned how much he hated as a reader knowing that Great Expectations had an alternate ending that was bleaker, and reading this other ending, and knowing that Dickens had solicited the advice of a friend on what to do. Once a work of art has officially entered the world, we do seem to want to think of it as whole and inviolable.

To get back to the idea of mistakes, I think that above all you just have to accept as an editor that you will make mistakes, that it’s inevitable. You really have to get over the fear of looking foolish to the writer, which can be difficult, especially if you’re working with the writer for the first time and it happens to be someone whose work you really admire. But if I can’t understand the effect a writer is after, I have to just say, Hey, how do want this part to work? And then she tells me and I say, Oh, okay, well, here’s how it came across to me and might come across to another careful reader, and if you want to get this effect you’re going for, maybe we could do that by trying such and such. If the process goes well, it becomes a silent collaboration in its final stages.

Ecotone has had a steep rise – publishing really strong work right out of the gate, getting a lot of recognition, and now venturing into book publishing with Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision. In a world full of places to read literature, how have you set yourself apart?

If we have set ourselves apart, it is probably first through the unique mission of Ecotone. The title of the magazine is a word that means a transition zone between adjacent ecological communities. It’s usually a testing ground, with greater-than-usual species diversity, a place of danger or opportunity. For us it’s a metaphor. It’s about bringing what are generally thought of as disparate kinds of writing together. It’s a chance to bridge the gap between science and culture, to show that they needn’t be enemies. I like to say that we’re the only literary magazine where you could possibly find a full-length play by Denis Johnson sharing space with an interview with National Geographic’s environment editor about innovative ways to solve global warming (carbon-scrubbing machines). I think that’s tremendously exciting, and I hope readers do, too. Our “Sex and Death” issue had an essay about the giant ichneumon wasp and the afterlife (an essay that beat out pieces from the New York Times Magazine, the Smithsonian, and Orion for the John Burroughs Award, given for the most outstanding natural history essay published in a given year) sitting nearby a picaresque story by the inimitable George Singleton.

As for a steep rise, I don’t know. That’s a generous formulation. I would like it if it were accurate. If it’s true, it’s honestly just about trying to work harder than anybody else, trying to put out the most beautiful magazine, both in content and appearance, that you could possibly put out under your constraints, budgetary and otherwise. What I mean is that Orhan Pamuk isn’t going to publish his work in Ecotone. As Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks said about the Southern Review when they founded it, the magazine would insist on “the highest possible standards of excellence,” but they conceded that the phrase highest possible was a “tricky thing,” because “what is ‘possible’ for any magazine is what is actually available, from issue to issue, for its pages.” And then there are also the vagaries of an editor’s taste. A magazine will always be dependent upon both this and what Penn Warren and Brooks called “the uncertain mercy of the morning mail delivery.” But while we can’t publish Pamuk, we can publish other things that are I hope equally interesting. We just have to work harder to do that.

You said it when you said there’s a world full of literature to read. So to publish anything at all is almost hubris. I have a job, of course, and a family to support. So I had better put out a magazine and books. But I really feel a responsibility to the reader. I take it seriously that if I’m asking for his time, then I need to be offering something nourishing, something worthy of the time I’ve asked for. Because, yes, the reader can read Balzac or Stendhal or Didion or DeLillo. So why exactly should she spend her time reading my magazine? It’s not as though we’re offering something timely, like reportage on the Libyan conflict.

It’s about that indefinable thing called taste. I try to be discerning, to choose and then to edit work that by my own lights (which, true, are the only lights I have) will—I believe, I hope—bring the reader the pleasure they brought me.

At what point did you realize you wanted to be an editor? What about it do you find satisfying?

In answer to your first question, probably during graduate school, when I was editing a literary magazine called Fugue at the University of Idaho. I enjoyed doing that all along the way, and my last issue in particular—when we published four new poems by W. S. Merwin (the current U.S. Poet Laureate), along with an interview with him and a dozen or more tributes by other writers in honor of his book Migration, which selected about fifty years’ worth of his poems—gave me a sense of the excitement that could be involved with being an editor.

I can’t answer your second question in anything other than a high-flown fashion. As I indicated earlier, it’s exciting to be a collaborator in the creative process, behind the curtain, as it were—to know that you’re aiding the writer in making a piece of art as beautiful and pleasure-giving as it can be. The high-flown part is that I do it because I hope to be at the frontier of new literature, and to have an unseen hand, however small, in the shaping of its history. You mentioned Edith Pearlman. Here is an exquisite writer of stories—one of the absolute best and wisest now working, in my opinion—but so many readers weren’t familiar with her. From the time I came to Wilmington it was my goal to do a grand volume of New & Selected stories for her as the debut of the book imprint that Emily Smith and I were going to launch. I gave a lot of myself to helping Edith get Binocular Vision ready for publication, from winnowing and arranging the stories with her to editing them a final time. When the book came out earlier this year, it hit the cover of the New York Times Book Review and was an Editors’ Choice for the paper. If anybody’s still reading in a hundred years, and the person wants to look back in 2111 and see which books the NY Times thought were worth paying attention to in the third week of January of 2011, that person will see Edith’s book on the cover. What’s more, we just learned that Edith will be awarded the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award, for lifetime contribution to the story form, joining the likes of Bellow, Updike, Welty, Munro, et al. This is all due to Edith’s glorious writing, but writers need paladins, and for me to be permitted a hand in bringing Edith’s deserving work to wider notice is a gift for which words fail me.

Readers may not understand how crucial little magazines have always been. Pick your favorite story, poem, or essay of the last hundred years, and it is likely to have had its first public genesis in a literary magazine. There was a magazine called Others that almost no one has heard of. It was started by a poet and critic named Alfred Kreymborg and existed for just a handful of years, mostly during the First World War, before folding due to—what else?—financial difficulties. Of course it published plenty of work by people we don’t read anymore, but in that short span Kreymborg also published poems by Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Carl Sandburg, Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, Conrad Aiken, and others. In December of 1917 (almost a hundred years ago now!), Kreymborg published Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Can you imagine opening that issue and reading that poem and having your mind blown? You would have to understand you were experiencing something singular, something that would never be replicated. I can’t talk further about the excitement of that without using profanity. And to be the editor who gave readers their first access to that poem? Forget about it. I quote sections from that poem from time to time just to give myself the shivers.

Or think about “Sonny’s Blues,” which I mentioned earlier, a story by James Baldwin that should be required reading for everyone in America. That story first appeared in the Partisan Review in 1957. Again, if you know that story, imagine being one of the first people in the world to read it, and imagine being the editor privileged enough to bring it to people. You’re touching something that is as close to eternal as we get in this mortal life.

You edited The Book of Dads, a collection of essays about fatherhood published in 2009. What inspired you to do that? What larger impressions about fatherhood did you come away with?

I suppose the quickest answer is that I wanted a book like this for myself after my daughter was born, a group of essays on being a father by some of our leading writers, but it didn’t seem to exist. In fact, when I entered the word fatherhood in Amazon’s search engine, it returned the question Did you mean ‘motherhood’? That is literally true. I wish I had a screen shot of it. They changed it eventually, but up until a couple of years ago, that still happened.

I don’t know if I necessarily was looking for larger impressions. I was more looking to be fortified, by hearing about the experiences of others, for this new phase of my life I had chosen to embrace but for which I was nevertheless unprepared. Of course, it wasn’t only reading the experiences of others that I wanted. More specifically, it was hearing especially from writers I admired, who had already been quite articulate about other aspects of living.

If there is any larger impression, it is that fathers today seem to worry more and be anxious more, at least publicly, about whether they’re being good fathers and about whether they’re avoiding doing damage to their children. There’s a hyper self-awareness. It remains to be seen whether fathers are truly more involved in their children’s lives and in domestic tasks, or whether that’s just a bill of goods that we’ve sold ourselves in the last couple of decades. One of the things that emerged when I was putting the book together was how involved my own father had been in the upbringing of my brothers and me in a way I hadn’t known about. For a while he was working first shift and my mother was working second shift, and he would come home and feed three young boys (my mother had made the dinner) and bathe us and read to us and put us to bed. Knowing what’s involved in caring for just one child, that strikes me as at least mildly heroic. It was just something that he never felt the need to congratulate himself for, and so I didn’t really know about it. That does make me wonder about the veracity of our myth of the American father evolving from distant provider to a father who is involved and “emotionally available,” as we like to say. I suspect there have always been different sorts of fathers.

But the book gave me what I most wanted, which was emotional ballast and the gift of sharing in the stories of other fathers. And it definitely affirmed the level of sacrifice necessary to do things the right way.

Which writers have had the biggest influence on you?

An impossible question to answer, because one will always overstate the influence of one writer while forgetting to mention another writer, and because I’m also not sure we ever know. Sometimes the writers by whom we most want to be influenced or by whom we flatter ourselves that we’re influenced are not in fact our greatest influences. Everything—even, or perhaps especially, bad writing—influences you to a degree.

Equivocation aside, I’d say Chekhov for the depth of soul and wisdom in his stories, Pearlman for her wit and deep understanding of any character at any age and for her singular and unapproachable (by any other writer I can think of) compression, DeLillo for his sentences, Didion for her unassailable intelligence and insight into the culture, the triumvirate of Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Richard Ford for their unerring storytelling instincts, both in short stories and, in the case of Ford, novels. And then basically the list would be never-ending. William Maxwell, James Baldwin, W. S. Merwin, Ben Fountain, and where do you stop? I just want writing that makes me ecstatic in one way or another, whatever its means of achieving that state.

In a larger sense, what does literature do for us? Why do we need to make it and read it?

You couldn’t give me a softball for the last question, eh? Something like “So what’s next for Ecotone?”

Well, these are among the most important and persistent questions of all for those of us who love to read and, alternately, to write. But they’re ultimately unanswerable in any meaningful way, aren’t they? It would take at least an essay, probably a book, and I’m not foolish enough to think I can shed any light on something that minds which are galaxies more resourceful than mine have spilled a lot of ink pondering.

I can answer the first question only in a roundabout way, by saying what literature does for me. Its pleasures are so marvelously varied and, for me, unattainable in any other format. Much of it comes down simply to sentences, and how very much they can contain and how different they can be. You can get something droll and clever on the one hand. Or you can get something rousing and lyrical, rhythmic and haunting, saturated with feeling. To give you an example of the former, I recently started reading Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, which is essentially a popular history of the last five hundred years of culture. He has a couple of lines in there about the Council of Trent, which was the Catholic Church’s belated attempt at internal reform after failing to quell Luther’s Protestant Reformation. He writes, “The bishops were certainly deliberate: they took eighteen years, in three bouts of discussion, to reach a consensus. It was a providential schedule: old resisters could be gradually argued into their graves.” If that kind of sage understatement doesn’t bring you great pleasure, I doubt I could enjoy conversation with you. DeLillo is so good at the other kinds of sentences. There’s a line in Great Jones Street (which, by the way, opens with the terrific sentence “Fame requires every kind of excess”) from the narrator, Bucky Wunderlick, a rock-and-roll star, where he says, “I set the radio dial between local stations and picked up some dust from a delta-blues guitar far off in the night,” and as the reader you’re just instantly transported. It’s almost hard to go on to the next sentence. It’s like being in an art gallery with friends, where everyone is ready to move on to the next thing, but you’re standing there still smitten with some painting you don’t want to leave. “Picked up some dust”—that’s so subtle, but you could write a few pages about all of its associations, just as you could about the dial being “between stations” or about the guitar being “far off in the night.” It’s the ultimate concentration of the writer’s power in precise, but unexpected, words and phrases that are loaded with feeling and therefore meaning. DeLillo can somehow do it in sentence after sentence. It makes sense, in a way, since he’s said that this is how the writer works, “sentence by sentence into the breach.”

As for the second question, I guess I would say that from almost the youngest age imaginable we exhibit the desire to represent the world to ourselves through some form of expression. When it involves language, we seem to have an innate urge for metaphor. I recall a lunch with my daughter from a few years back, when she was two. She had a square slice of cheese she was nibbling at, and when she’d taken a few bites here and there, she held it up to me and said, “Look, a boat!” And then she continued on it that vein, taking a few more bites and proclaiming some new thing that the piece of cheese now resembled, a cake or a goat. She’ll never remember that day, but I will. The lesson it taught me is how we must yearn from early on for the world to make sense to us, to compare like things with unalike things and somehow order our experience.

Writing does that. Painting does that. Music is an expression of something we feel very deeply within ourselves, a celebration or a lament for what it means to be alive. Almost twenty thousand years ago, people were painting bison on cave walls at Lascaux. Like everyone else, I suppose I’m curious about the “why” question. But for me it doesn’t matter so much why they did it, but that they did it—and that what they did is there for us to witness and marvel at. Looking at those paintings, reading Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: these are things that connect us to the collective unconscious in profound and mysterious and deeply gratifying ways. That’s why we do them, I think. Making our own art is just a natural outgrowth, our chance to leave behind some record of what it was like to be alive in our own age, and to share those expressions with our fellow man.

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To read past interviews in this series, here’s the portal.

Banville is an Irish writer who often writes about horrible men in astonishly rich, beautiful prose — the cliched comparison is to Nabokov, and for whatever reason, it’s a combination that I find irresistable. He’s an incredibly vivid writer, and he makes you feel his world distinctly. The language itself is complex and ambitious and lush — verging on the too-pretty, but never quite getting there. Some of his books seem, at times, virtually plotless, while others develop the tension of a great mystery. He also writes thrillers under the pen name Benjamin Black, which I will read the moment I finish the Banville catalog.

Anyway, here is my pretend interview with John Banville.

How are you feeling about death these days, John?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7szK6ArSh0&feature=related

We seem to live in a state of constant anxiety about the book, about reading. Should more people read?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2pOCJsUv-Q&feature=related

Why did you begin writing crime fiction under the name Benjamin Black?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-p5cbA8wOI&feature=youtube_gdata

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIV3kwNGqW4&feature=related

Did you ever do a reading and interview with the National Post about your recent book, The Infinities?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffnfDCh9bC4&feature=player_embedded#at=244

OK, good enough. If you’re interested in reading Banville, I recommend The Book of Evidence or The Sea as places to start.

And next week I’ll be back with a real interview — a Q-and-A with Ecotone editor Ben George.

Andrew Scott

I’ve been a reader of Scott’s, in one way or another, for a few years now. I love the idea and spirit behind the book club, and I once won a free copy of Scott’s excellent story chapbook, Modern Love, by writing an overheated mock reviewer’s blurb for it. His work has appeared in Esquire, Ninth Letter, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review and other publications. He co-edits the online journal Freight Stories, teaches at Ball State University and lives in Indianapolis.

Scott graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

Your new collection, Naked Summer, was just published by Press 53. Can you describe the book and stories just a bit?

Naked Summer is a collection of nine stories, all of them set in and around Tippecanoe County in Indiana, where my hometown, Lafayette, is the county seat. The shortest story is the opener, which was written on a cocktail napkin for Esquire. The longest is the closer, which is nearly a novella. In between are stories of various sizes. One of the nicest things someone has said about them—the other night, at a reading—was that they’re the kind of stories you want to read twice. That’s something I’ve always tried to do, based on advice from Lee K. Abbott.

Would you tell the story of one of your stories? How it began and made its way to its final state?

I worked on many of these stories for 10 years, off and on, so they all have long histories, and all of them taught me something about writing fiction, or about myself as a writer. One of the stories, “Uniform,” began on a winter break trip home to Lafayette during graduate school, which was no easy journey, as I attended an MFA program in New Mexico. It was a 20-hour drive, so I planned to visit for a few weeks. I stopped in at the mall to buy some Christmas presents for friends and family. This was so long ago that the woman in front of me was paying with a check—I haven’t seen someone do that for years—and the cashier kept her waiting for some reason, her checkbook open for several minutes, long enough that I saw her name on the check. I gave her name to the neighbor I created, who ends up sleeping with the teenage boy who lives across the street. It’s from his point of view, and I’d been kicking around a few ideas that found their way into the story. That’s how stories initially fall together for me.

There were many news stories about older women, especially teachers, sleeping with younger males—boys, really—and being arrested for their behavior. A lot of men joked about it, as if there could never be anything wrong in those scenarios, that it was every boy’s dream to shag a teacher or the woman across the street. So I was interested in playing with those ideas.

A famous visiting writer read my story and said, “I wouldn’t sleep with him.” I fumed for weeks. Years, really. Writers deal with rejection every day. But to say my protagonist is unfuckable? How dare you, Oprah’s Book Club author! After all these years, I need to say that my character would not sleep with her, either.

The story was published just a week or so before the book came out, in a journal I love called Booth, and superbly edited by Bryan Furuness, a friend and writer I admire, who made a few crucial suggestions that improved the story.

You’ve run Andrew’s Book Club in a couple different forms, as a way to promote work that you like and short stories generally. How did that project originate, and how has it developed?

In 2008, I moderated a great AWP panel on the American short story, and one of my panelists, Cathy Day—who now teaches at Ball State, as I do—urged the audience to find unique ways to support short stories. I was thinking of this many months later, on New Year’s Day, actually, and sort of threw the idea together and launched it online within a few hours. The first month’s response was incredible, with nearly 2,000 unique visitors to the website.

I stopped doing it for six months or so last year, and when I started up again, I wanted to also include novels, not just story collections. But I’ve only chosen one novel, and people seemed a little grumpy that I stepped away from story collections, even for a month. So I may not do that again. For the rest of 2011, I’d like to only select debut story collections, to help give a boost to writers early in their careers. And I’m now only choosing one book a month, even though that means I won’t get to support—in this way, at least—as many books and authors as I’d like.

You co-edit Freight Stories, an online fiction journal. Beyond the basic question of quality, do you think that a certain kind of story works better online—whether it’s a question of length or style or any other characteristic?

I like to argue with editors who suggest that readers only have the attention span online for short articles or short stories. Every day, somebody I trust shares on Facebook an interesting link to something I should read, and these articles and stories are often longer than 2,000 words. Reading longer work online might be easier, I imagine, with an iPad or any large tablet, though I don’t have one. I read long news stories on my phone, though, so I don’t understand this mindset that everything must be short.

I’m also happy to see that attitudes and stylistic expectations for online literature are changing. One of the goals we set out to accomplish with Freight Stories was to bring experienced authors to the Internet—writers who were perhaps intimidated by the prospect of their work appearing online, simply because it had never happened before, or who perhaps snubbed it, rightly, in its earliest forms. But now I think most writers and readers recognize that there are both strong and weak online journals, just as there are both strong and weak print journals.

For me, online journals provided readers for five of the stories in Naked Summer, plus a few other pieces, and helped me begin to build an audience for my work. And I’m excited about the long-delayed next issue of Freight Stories, which will be published this summer.

If I’m not mistaken, Freight Stories and the book club are labors of love for you – things that you do in addition to bills-paying work. How do you balance working, writing, editing and other work on behalf of literature – do you chip away a bit at each thing every day, or do big binges where you focus on one or the other thing?

You are mistaken. First of all, the literary journal racket is good money. I’m rolling in it. After every shower, I dry off with towels made of stitched-together Benjamins. This whole “labor of love” thing is just a cover to divert others who might be better at it, so I can keep more Bentleys (plural) in the garage.

The truth? Mostly I feel like a failure at all of the things I’m working on. Andrew’s Book Club is easy to do. But if there’s a month when the traffic falls of for some reason, or it’s clear that the selection just doesn’t resonate with readers, I feel like a big loser. That’s one problem of putting my own name on the endeavor. And Freight Stories hasn’t had a new issue in a year, which I regret deeply. We’ve been reading submissions the whole time, and our falling behind is somewhat understandable—I was finishing up Naked Summer for publication, and my co-editor, Victoria Barrett, started a great new press called Engine Books—but there are days when I regret how one effort suffers while another prospers. Right now, I’m pretty happy as a writer: my first book is finally out. A few years ago, I was not happy with what was happening for me as a writer, but the editing work buoyed me. I’m always more confident as an editor. And I never want to get too comfortable as a writer, either.

How does being an editor affect you as a writer? In what ways do you think you see your own work more clearly or less clearly than you see the work of others?

I’ve been both an editor and a writer since 1999, so it’s integral to who I am as a creative person. They’re different roles, sure, and if I had to choose, I’d choose to only be a writer. But I don’t have to choose, thankfully.

I’m able to see the work of others much more clearly than my own, and more quickly—that’s one of the satisfactions I get from this work, the feeling of competence, even excellence, as an editor. I rarely feel that as a writer, and when I do, I’m usually wrong.

Here’s an example: I asked Victoria Barrett—the co-editor I mentioned, but also my wife, who’s a gifted sentence-maker—to give my collection a hard line edit. It had been six or seven years since she’d last seen the collection as a whole. I kept reworking the stories, the sentences, and she was impressed by the improvements. But the last section of the final story in Naked Summer—the title story, actually—began, in the draft I gave her, with a sentence that used the same word three times, and not in any kind of deliberate, designed pattern. Such sloppiness, after having just gone over the pages again the week before asking for her help. Everybody needs an editor.

What stories have been most important to you as a writer – which ones made you say to yourself: I want to do that?

I’m ashamed of my first reaction to many of the stories I now think of as favorites. I remember walking into a creative writing class in college and wondering aloud what the hell was up with all of those lists in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” and bitching that  James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” was too damn long, and that Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” was—here it comes—boring. And those are only three of the many stories I now think are perfect and will gladly re-read every few years until I die.

I read Richard Ford’s Rock Springs a dozen times. I loved Raymond Carver’s stories, with a preference for his post-Lish work, such as “Errand” and “Call If You Need Me.” Andre Dubus. Jhumpa Lahiri. Junot Diaz. William Trevor. Alice Munro. Paul Yoon. I feel like I’m just naming the obvious story writers everyone should read. I love Colum McCann’s stories and wish he’d publish another book of them.

I wish I could write a story as good as Mona Simpson’s “Lawns,” Jean Thompson’s “All Shall Love Me and Despair,” or Michael Cunningham’s “Mister Brother” or “White Angel,” for instance. Or, to name a few I’ve read recently, Alan Heathcock’s “The Staying Freight,” Barb Johnson’s “Killer Heart,” and Jonathan Lethem’s “Super Goat Man.” I love all of the stories in Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, plus his story “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” from Tabloid Dreams.

Now that I’m also working on a linked collection, I’m going back to books from 15-20 years ago that deserve even wider audiences, like Debra Monroe’s A Wild, Cold State and Tom Chiarella’s Foley’s Luck, which were published as linked collections before we knew what to do with them as readers, really.

There’s no shortage of good, or even great, short stories in the world today, especially since I always dig around for writers whose work I should have read by now, such as Mavis Gallant or Mary Lavin. There will always be another great book to pull from the shelf.

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To read past interviews in this series, go here.

Follow me on Twitter, if you’re into that, at @vestal13.

Daniel Orozco

But Orientation and Other Stories is landing with a big splash. Over the course of the long wait for publication, Orozco has built a following, one beautifully crafted story at a time. Now the book is getting glowing reviews all over the place; Julie Orringer wrote, “This may be Orozco’s first collection, but he’s nothing short of a master.” Here’s the review from New West.

His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, Ecotone and StoryQuarterly, and been picked for the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories and others. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he teaches at the University of Idaho.

He graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

You’ve described yourself as a slow writer, and the stories in Orientation were written over many years. How long do you work on stories, and do you work on them in a continuous stretch? Or do you start and stop, pick them up and put them down, etc.?

I started one story and put it down and picked it up seventeen years later and finished it, but that’s the only time that’s happened. I finished another story in about eight weeks, but that’s rare too. And so my rate of story production falls somewhere between those two extremes. Typically, each story is a discrete, singular project, finished more or less in one stretch.  Each project may be interrupted by life–work-related stuff, personal crises, acts of God, etc.–but never by another story. I’m not a very good multi-tasker.

You’ve had lots of publishing success – from being selected for Best American Short Stories to lots of prestigious fellowships and residencies – but is there something particularly satisfying about having your first book appear?

It never stops being satisfying. I see a story of mine typeset and in print in a magazine or journal, and I still do a little dance. The book is satisfying, yes, but the feeling I have is mostly relief. There was a time when I thought I’d never get a collection published, frankly. I was so slow that I didn’t think I’d get enough stories for a collection. And when I finally did, I was being told that story collections don’t sell. Nobody wanted to publish it for the longest time. So: here it is!

Your title story has a narrator, but also operates with a kind of collective voice. It struck me as both a great reflection of a manager’s presumption and a rich territory for a writer to move around in – between the individual and the collective. How hard was it to strike the right balance in that voice?

It took a long time to nail that voice. When I start a story I’ll linger over the first few pages or so for weeks, noodling and tinkering–often reading aloud–until I feel I’ve got a storyteller that serves the story being told. The way you describe the voice in “Orientation” is very astute, and spot-on, but when I was working on it I was just . . . working on it, listening to what I was writing until it just sounded right, working to achieve the effect I couldn’t have articulated that I was listening for, if that makes sense.

What do you find are your recurring preoccupations as a writer? And are they in the forefront of your mind as you work, or do you find them emerging unbidden?

When I teach a fiction writing class the one unit/topic I skip is “theme.” I went to Catholic school when I was a boy, taught by nuns who would teach theme. They’d walk around the room and ask “What’s this story about?” and you’d answer and they’d say “No, wrong.” So you’d offer another answer and they’d say “Close!  But no.” And so, theme was a like this one key they held in their hand, and if you guessed the right theme, you would have the key to unlocking the story.

I’ll tell a student that story is experiential, not thematic, that story engages via human action and reaction, not via idea. I’ll tell her not to write about, say, the plight of the elderly on America, but to write instead about the summer her grandfather fell down the stairs and broke his hip and had to move in with her family. I’m belaboring this point, I guess: that for me, what a story is about arises from what happens in it. A writer works on a story every day for months, with the primary goal of telling a human story that engages emotively. Doing just that–immersively, ongoingly, daily–the preoccupation or theme or worldview will emerge unbidden.

Although–and here I undercut my argument, I guess–I do sometimes look for an epigraph for a story I’m working on, some quote from another text that somehow distills or speaks to the story I want to tell. After writing the story, I’ll get rid of the epigraph. Sometimes I’ll keep it though, as in “Hunger Tales,” with this quote from the Book of Palms: “And so they did eat, and were well filled; for he gave them their own desire. . . .”

Are you working on a novel or a longer work? How has that shift gone?

I started a novel about five years ago. I didn’t want to but the demands of the market seemed to require that I write one. This far along, though, I’m actually enjoying the challenge of writing a longer, multi-stranded narrative, mapping out a chronology, shaping and structuring chapters, creating a story on a much larger canvas than I’m used to. But it’s so immersive and consuming being inside a novel, and so I had to set it aside a few years ago, and I took a break from it to write a story.  But no more breaks now, I don’t think.

How do you see the relationship between teaching writing and writing? Does teaching dilute the energy to write or restore it?

When I’m working on a project I am always in my head, and everything about teaching–prepping for class, going to office hours, reading/grading exercises, etc.–gets me out of my head. What feels at first like an interruption of the creative process actually becomes a necessary respite from it. Also: teaching writing re-acquaints me with the nuts-and-bolts of narrative technique. I think it’s always good to not forget the basics.

Not to boil things down to catch-phrases, but what are the main pieces of advice you find yourself giving to students repeatedly?

I tell my students two things over and over and over again until they are probably sick of hearing it, but these things must be told! First: Read. A lot. Reading is the flipside of writing; you can’t be a good writer if you are not a good reader, and both take practice.  Reading like a writer means not asking  “Do I like–or not like–this story?” but rather “How does this story work?” Students balk at the idea of reading analytically: “It’s not fun!” But analysis doesn’t preclude pleasure–you can do both. That’s the practice of reading like a writer.

Second: Commit to writing at least twenty minutes a day. If you go longer, that’s fine, go longer if it’s going well. But sit down and do nothing but your writing for twenty minutes. You must always be going back to the world of the story; you can’t abandon it for Spring break, and you can’t write it two days before it’s due. Twenty minutes a day is a do-able, feasible way to establish the habit of writing.

Which writers have been most important to you?

I tend to organize influential writers by particular books that have influenced-affected-inspired me, and so: Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones; Back in the World by Tobias Wolff; Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro; Mr. Ives’ Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos; The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker; That Night by Alice McDermott; Neuromancer by William Gibson; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen; and two books that are–sadly–out of print, Backbone by Carol Bly and Squandering the Blue by Kate Braverman.

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You can order a copy of Orientation and Other Stories here.

You can listen to Daniel read the title story on a 1996 episode of This American Life here.

To see past interviews in this series, go here.

Kenneth Calhoun

His story “Nightblooming,” which was originally published in The Paris Review, was selected for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011. He has created an interactive online story, “Big Swing,” based on one of his short-shorts. And he’s an assistant professor of graphic design at Lasell College in Newton, Mass.

Calhoun graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

Your story, “Then,” draws me back, in part, because I’m trying to sort it out, and can’t fully or exactly do that. How do you find a balance between maintaining mystery and telling the story? How do you suggest or signal what lies behind what’s on the page?

The design of the story, which was inspired by the insomnia theme, is meant to suggest that it was a whole, linear thing that has been cut up and re-arranged out of sequence, with parts left out. This is the impression it hopes to give, though it’s an illusion. That is, it never was a whole thing that was cut up and re-arranged. Instead, I just wrote flashes and glimpses—sometimes in chronological order, sometimes not—knowing that the gaps and all the connective tissue would be added by the reader’s mind. The reader’s mind would also try to organize the story and struggle to make sense of it, if the reader cared enough about the situation and the characters.

In addition to the challenge of creating characters that feel alive, I think the art part—the thing that is finessed during the act of writing—is determining whether you’ve given the reader enough pieces of the puzzle to fit together, and reason enough to do the fitting. To get there, I read the story repeatedly as I wrote it and added in sections here and there to help along the connections, keeping in mind the Kuleshov Effect.

I also shuffled the order around until it seemed to flow right—in terms of building tension. Then I cut away anything that felt unnecessary or obvious. In the end, I thought maybe it wasn’t adding up, but I showed it to a few trusted readers and they seemed to not only perceive the full shape of it, but they filled in the blanks in ways that added to the story.

You have a multimedia story, “Big Swing,” that’s available online. It has a similar mystery and mood to it – it leaves a lot of space for the viewer to enter. Can you describe that project a bit – how it came to be and what you’re trying to accomplish?

“Big Swing” is based on a short short story that was published in Quick Fiction. In the print version, the main character is attacked by a coyote while videotaping himself as he practices his golf swing. Of course I wanted the coyote attack in the interactive version, but determined it would take too long to capture and train a coyote. So I made the storytelling apparatus itself—the digital interface—the fantastical element that juts into the story. That introduced some new themes that really interested me.

On a structural level, the piece was an attempt to explore semi-nonlinear storytelling. I’m intrigued by hypertext and experiments with database-driven narratives, but I am inevitably disappointed by the loss of narrative shape and the emptiness, not to mention imprecision, of totally random juxtapositions. I’m sort of Old School. I still want authorship. I want the author’s hand to build shapely tension. Big Swing was an attempt to give the reader some control and a sense of authorship at runtime while retaining fairly traditional narrative shape that has, in fact, been pre-configured by the author behind the scenes.

I built “Big Swing” with Flash and a talented friend of mine, J. McMerty, shot stills while I simultaneously shot all the video. As I put all the pieces together I got pretty high on the idea that this was a new, grand form of authorship, since it combined programming, video editing, image manipulation, graphic design and, of course, writing. I was feeling pretty damn good about myself. As exciting as all that was for me, I think the final product leaves a lot of people cold. That space you mentioned is unwelcomed by some who would prefer not to have to fill it themselves.

You taught a class at Duke called digital storytelling. I wonder if you can just talk about digital storytelling – perhaps explain just what that is, to an analog storyteller like me – and how it’s different from other kinds of storytelling.

In a very specific usage of the term, digital storytelling uses still photography and sound (narration, background music, ambient sound) to tell a story. These pieces are usually put together as video files, with the photography being scaled and panned a la Ken Burns. This approach, which has been fairly formalized by the Center for Digital Storytelling (http://www.storycenter.org) in Berkeley, is a great way to give voice to communities and individuals who aren’t usually part of the mainstream media mix. It’s an opportunity, enabled by new media, for people to be seen and heard in a format that can be easily disseminated (posted on YouTube, for example).

The course at Duke was meant to explore this specific approach to digital storytelling, but also included interactive storytelling (created in Flash or HTML/CSS), or multimedia storytelling (like audio slideshows) and video. So, my broader use of the term digital storytelling basically means storytelling that is authored on a computer and uses a variety of media formats. Another approach could be transmedia storytelling, which is telling a story via a number of channels, both digital and analog—for example, weaving threads of a story into a Twitter feed, a Facebook page, a blog, a journal, songs, a film, phone calls, text messages, etc. I was watching the film Catfish the other day and it occurred to me that the main guy was the audience for (or victim of) an elaborate transmedia production.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m always on the lookout for an idea that might benefit from this approach.

You have a hand in a variety of creative pursuits – design, fiction, music, film. Do you consider yourself more one kind of artist than another – do you see yourself as a writer or designer first, for example? How does your work in different genres and fields interact and relate to each other?

I think the banal answer is that I consider myself a storyteller and that sometimes I tell stories with words and sometimes I use other media. But I’d have to say that, regardless of format, it all starts with writing. I think like a writer. That is, writing is thinking for me. I love design and video editing. Doing both is actually more enjoyable to me than writing. And I can get deeply absorbed by my attempts to write code. But writing always presents itself as a fullest opportunity for articulation. It’s where I’m the least clumsy.

I do think the different forms of authoring inform each other. For example, “Then” was approached more like a film than a story. There’s even a reference to “jump cuts” in the piece. “Big Swing” is strung together with short lines of text, but fleshed out with images, sound design and animation. Other projects, even corporate pieces I have worked on, orchestrate different modes of expression in an attempt to convey very specific messages. But all of these projects start with scripts and stories.

In the context of your other creative work, why do you write fiction? What about that art form, in particular, draws you?

Fiction is my obsession (and probably fatal attraction), especially short fiction. When I’m looking out at the world, or inward, for that matter, I’m pretty much always looking for stories. This compulsion started when I was a teenager. At their core, stories are little tension machines: wind them up and watch them break your heart. I’m compelled to create these little machines the way some people are compelled to make whimsical birdhouses.

On second thought, at their core, stories are whimsical birdhouses.

Who are your favorite writers and why?

I like a wide range of writers. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Hemingway, but before that I was a fan of Ray Bradbury and even met him twice—once at the US Festival when I took a break from the concert to hear him read in an air-conditioned circus tent. At UCSD, I was introduced to a lot of Latin Americans and came away from the experience clutching Borges and, even more so, Cortazar. These days I’m into Barthelme, Aimee Bender, Sam Lipsyte, J.G. Ballard, A.M. Homes, Murakami, Diane Williams, Matthew Sharpe. Who else? Delillo. Kafka. I tend to read Cormac McCarthy every summer. There’s a wacky Russian surrealist named Daniil Kharms that I’ve been reading in stolen moments at the bookstore. I should probably buy that book.

Who are your favorite artists/designers in other fields?

Lately, I’ve been researching the Bauhaus, enjoying the work of Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky and the color experiments of Josef Albers. But what really interests me, as the chair for a graphic design department, is the learning model they created, and those of other experimental institutions like Black Mountain College. Other visual people that I’ve been into lately: Terrence Mallick, Magritte, Stephan Sagmeister, Nara, David O’Reilly, Francis Bacon, David Carson, MK12, Mary Ellen Mark, David Baeumler, Michel Gondry, and Chip Kidd. I’m doing a short animation collaboration with the mad genius Claudio Orso and, on an everyday basis, I’m astonished by work of the artist Anya Belkina, who happens to be my significant other. And then there’s this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxRT60-kw78

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To read past interviews in this series, here’s the portal.

C. Max Magee, founder of The Millions

This description seems ripe to be called “back-handed” by faithful defenders of the interwebs, but I mean it as a totally fore-handed compliment. The Millions is a great site. If you’re into good writing about good writing, and for some reason you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it.

Magee, who co-edited The Late Great American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books and who has written for many publications, graciously agreed to answer some questions by e-mail.

One of the things I appreciate about The Millions is its similarity to certain qualities of a printed publication – the writing is polished and edited, many of the pieces are long and detailed, and it has less of an impulsive, tossed-off quality than a lot of stuff online. How did you initially envision it working, in comparison to something like a book review or magazine, and how has that evolved?

The site started out as a blog in 2003 and wasn’t always as polished, but almost from the beginning I had traditional print publications in mind as models in terms the quality and depth of the writing.  I didn’t really have a fully formed vision for the site at the outset, and I didn’t have any expectation that I would be doing it for this long. So, much of what you see evolved pretty organically as the site got bigger and attained a wider readership and more writers got involved in the project.

What has your experience with The Millions taught you about building an audience online? How about the economic realities of making the enterprise survive?

There’s something to be said for writing pieces, clicking “publish” and letting the universe sort out the rest. In the early days, it was all about participating in the community of sites that were out there writing about similar topics. These days, to the extent that we make an effort to build our audience, being active on Twitter and Facebook helps. I strongly believe, though, that if you publish good work online, people will find you.

The economics are getting better. Books are not a lucrative niche relative to many of the other niches out there (tech, celebs, etc.), but in the last couple of years, I think certain advertisers have come to see the value in reaching readers of sites like The Millions.  Having said that, the sums involved aren’t huge. We are able to pay our staff writers for their efforts, but we are not yet able to pay our many guest writers.

The Millions compiles a Top 10 list of books purchased through Amazon by readers of the site – a nice example of the way that readers are a more prominent part of the equation online (or at least on your site). What does that kind of feature contribute to the site? How does it contribute to decisions you make as an editor?

I just happen to think it’s fascinating data, and I wanted to share it with our readers. The lists also let readers see what their peers are reading, and I frequently refer people to the lists when I’m asked for a book recommendation. The lists certainly don’t drive our coverage, but I do take note of when books seem to be rising in popularity even though we haven’t covered them much or at all. When that happens, I might look at covering that particular book.

You were the championship judge in the Tournament of Books at The Morning News, helping to choose between Freedom and A Visit From the Goon Squad. What was that experience like? Did you have a favorite book or books that you wished had made it deeper into the bracket?

This was my third time judging, and it is always a fun experience, though a little nerve-wracking since it feels like such a big stage. This particular matchup was tough because it felt like Freedom had received so much coverage already, and I knew the challenge would be to write something fresh about it. Like many Tournament readers, I would have liked to see Skippy Dies go further.

You co-edited The Late Great American Novel, a collection of essays published this year. Did working on those essays change your view of the novel and its current health as an art form and a cultural force?

Editing the book certainly made me think more on the topic. I still feel that the book is an extremely important and vibrant concept but that whether you consume it by turning pages or touching a screen matters less and less.

What makes a good editor?

At a high level, good editing starts with being able to identify good ideas – looking, for example, at a list of five ideas sent by a writer, and knowing which one will be the winner. When you’re writing, you can get buried in the piece, and so a good editor can also help a writer make connections and see new angles. The perfect situation for me is when it feels like a writer-driven collaboration, with my editorial input helping to focus and tighten the writer’s brilliant idea.

What books are you particularly excited about right now?

Check out our most recent top 10.  That does a pretty good job of summing up the books that are piquing my interest right now.

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To read past interviews, go here.

Follow me on Twitter, believe it or not, at @vestal13.

Caitlin Horrocks

Her first book, the collection This Is Not Your City, is being published this summer by Sarabande Books. Ron Carlson says of the collection: “How can a first book arrive with such advanced understanding of all the beautiful and sometimes shaded echelons of hope in which we live our lives? Caitlin Horrocks is a stunning writer and these stories mark a brilliant debut.”

Horrocks, an assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University, graciously agreed to answer these questions by e-mail.

You have a collection coming out this year, This Is Not Your City. Can you tell us a little about it?

The author questionnaire from my publisher asked me to do this in a single sentence, and I came up with “Darkly comic stories about people wrestling with their imperfect lives, in ways both everyday and outlandish.”

The stories are unlinked, and set in different states and countries; the title story is about a Russian mail order bride in Finland; another is set on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates, another is about girls in Michigan haunted by an imaginary ogre. I wrote them over several years, from when I was 24 to 28, and I tried to make them the kinds of stories I like to read—sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes both at once. Sometimes quirky, but always rooted in people that felt real to me, and hopefully to the reader.

Imaginatively, where do your stories typically begin, and how do they grow?

Anywhere and everywhere, which sounds like a lame answer, but it’s true. Certain stories grow out of specific assignments I’ve given myself: “World Champion Cow of the Insane” was my attempt to write a straightforwardly happy ending, and in “Zolaria,” I knew I wanted to try a piece that moved backward and forward in time. I’ve written stories inspired by television shows or weird news items, and I’ve written ones that started with a single line or image. I think all writers are, or should be, magpies, picking up stuff as we go and figuring out how to use it all later.

I’ve read that you’re working on a novel. What are the differences for you between writing stories and writing a novel?

The main difference is that I have no clue what I’m doing on the novel. There was a point that I felt that way with stories, of course, but I’ve had years, practice, lots of good workshops and good readers, to help me figure things out. I haven’t decoded the form, but it’s a forest I’m used to hacking my way through.

My novel project feels like a jungle without any clear paths at all. I don’t know which plants are poisonous or which animals might eat me. There are weird noises in the distance. I don’t have the right kind of shoes. It’s always raining, and I’d like to cower under some leaves and just research forever, but I know I have to step out, start tromping, and get muddy.

I heard the writer Peter Ho Davies refer to a story as a rock that you could cup in your hand: hold it up to the light, feel the whole shape of it at once. The novel was a giant boulder you could only walk around, seeing small slices of it at a time. I like this image a lot. I just need to keep reminding myself that I can get around the whole rock that way, with more steps and more patience. And through the jungle? Picture the rock in the jungle. Then it all fits.

Your sentences often seem to include some movement – whether it’s a word choice or a rhythm – that provides a pleasing jolt of surprise. Is the element of surprise, on the level of the sentence, something you think of consciously as you’re writing and revising?

I think about it, but sometimes because I feel like I’m trying to squeeze out from under my natural lack of lyricism.  I know writers, often people who write both poetry and fiction, who seem to effortlessly spin out surprising, gorgeous sentences, including words I’ve never put on the page in my life. Those lines don’t come easily for me, and I think of myself as more of a storyteller than a stylist. But of course I don’t want to write hundreds of pages of “transparent” prose like, “He walked across the room. He sat down. He bored himself to sleep.”  So I suppose I’ve tried to carve out a middle ground.

What’s your view of collections as unified, thematic, linked books versus gatherings of disparate, unrelated stories? Does it matter to you, as a reader, if there are connections?

There are obviously extraordinary linked collections out there, but I tend to prefer fewer connections to more. I know unlinked stories are a marketing challenge, but I personally haven’t ever read a collection where I thought, “Hey, what are all these stories doing here together?” Even if they all feel like they stumbled into the same book by accident, that’s fun for me, as a reader. It’s like a good bar with a diverse crowd. You don’t want to walk in and see every single person wearing jeggings and drinking PBR.

What would be on a brainstorming list for an anthology of your favorite short stories?

My teacher-brain almost immediately overtakes my writer-brain or reader-brain on this one: the stories that come quickest to mind to include in an anthology are some of the ones I’ve found most teachable. “Lederhosen” by Haruki Murakami, from The Elephant Vanishes, would definitely be in. I have moments of victory every semester when the students start bemoaning the lack of (metaphorical) lederhosen in each other’s pieces.

Other immediate picks: “Lawns” by Mona Simpson, “Men Under Water” by Ralph Lombreglia, “Where We Must Be,” by Laura van den Berg, “To Reduce Your Likelihood of Murder” by Ander Monson, “L. DeBard and Aliette” by Lauren Groff, “Coddled” by Benjamin Drevlow, “The Way We Live Now” by Susan Sontag, “Brownies,” by Z.Z. Packer.

People are always gloomy about the vitality of the short story – or at least some people are. But then it seems that stories continue to thrive in certain ways, and there are plenty of places to read them, now including a growing number of online avenues, and you have published scads of stories all over the place. Where do you place yourself on the optimism/pessimism scale about the short story? Why do you think people are always diagnosing it with fatal disease?

I think there might be two different scales, one for the economic prospects of short stories, and one for the health of the actual stories. I think the form is thriving, with great work happening online, in print, in collections and anthologies. There’s so much out there that’s so good.

But at major publishing houses, story collections are charity cases. I think what’s happening to stories is what’s already happened to poetry—it’s been largely chased off the front tables of bookstores (or bookstores altogether) and off the lists at large publishers. But that doesn’t mean poetry isn’t being published. It just gets taken up by small publishers, independent and university presses, and marketed and sold in different ways. The energy and passion and quality in small press publishing is fantastic, and I think stories can thrive with that kind of home.

But the risk is that it becomes a closed system. Tiny books stay tiny because word of them only gets out to the people (fellow writers and esoteric readers) who already have their ears to the small press, independent bookstore ground. Assuming writers want to be read by as big an audience as possible (and maybe even pay their rent) this is a problem. But the stories themselves are alive and kicking and beautiful, and I think they get diagnosed with terminal illness so often because it’s an easy narrative. Anyone who’s ever written a short story knows it’s simpler to break up a marriage or kill off a grandma than to create a narrative that’s honest but hopeful. But it’s worth the effort. Let’s stop dumping stories, and grandmas, automatically in the ground.

You have a story, “The Sleep,” that is available for download on the Kindle, through The Atlantic. This seems like a cool frontier for the story – 3 bucks a pop, available in discrete units. How has that experiment worked out?

For sales figures, you’d have to ask The Atlantic—I have no idea. As a writer, I like being in different places: online, on the page, on someone’s Kindle. I love physical books, but electronic publishing can’t be the enemy. I think one of the challenges of eBooks (and eStories), is figuring out the pricing. iTunes has us all trained that a song is worth a dollar. But I don’t think anyone knows yet what text is “worth” when we’re buying it divorced from paper and covers. Hopefully the Atlantic Fiction for Kindle series can help figure that out. I was honored to work with them, and really pleased to find out that that story, “The Sleep,” has been selected for Best American Short Stories 2011. So I’m excited that it’s returning to dead-tree form, but also excited that the series editor was looking at this other medium, Kindle downloads, for prospective stories to include in the anthology.

Your story “On the Oregon Trail” is really funny and delightful and shaded with notes of sadness and regret – but I didn’t know until after I’d read it that it was actually based on a video game. What’s the relationship between the game and the story?

That’s one of the few stories I’ve written where I limited my audience in my own head—I didn’t think at all about the piece being accessible to a reader who didn’t know the game. The piece started when I was listening to Ander Monson talk at the AWP conference about video games and electronic environments. The list of video games that I’ve played more than once at someone else’s house is pretty much limited to Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Tetris, and Angry Birds. But I loved Oregon Trail as a kid, and I started thinking about how miserable it would be actually to be a character inside the game, to be forced into stupid decisions, punished for no reason, to be moving at a “grueling pace,” eating “meager rations.” Maybe this is truest of the earlier generations of video games: you can’t wake up in Oregon Trail and decide to do something else for the day. The little wagon automatically chugs west across the scene. I was interested in how that could work as a short story, but didn’t see any way to “explain” the game in the piece, rather than take it as a given. For me, the story and the game were inextricable, so it’s such a pleasure (and surprise!) to hear that you enjoyed one without being familiar with the other.

Do you remember the first story you ever wrote? Was there anything in that story that remains a thread in your work today?

I don’t remember my first story ever, but I remember being in fifth or sixth grade and writing what was essentially fanfiction, although I didn’t know the term. I started a giant choose-your-own-adventure novel as a gift for my younger sister, populated with our favorite fantasy characters (I interviewed her to make lists of who to include). I never finished it, or even came close.  For a fifth grade language arts assignment, I wrote a terrible “bonus chapter” to Bridge to Terebithia about Leslie being reincarnated as a bug and telling Jess to chill out and not be so sad about her death. The only commonality I can come up with is that fiction has always been a way that I’ve processed and responded to things. I read Katherine Patterson’s book, liked it, and wanted to engage with it by making fiction of my own. And “fixing” the tear jerker ending. I illustrated my chapter with a picture of the Leslie-bug in a jar, air holes punched in the lid, Jess’ big face looming over her.

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Visit Caitlin’s web site here.

You can read past interviews here.