Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon’s stories and novels are brilliant maps of mood and mystery, longing and secrecy. They are also beautifully written, vividly depicted, and moving, in more than one sense – they are emotionally affecting, but they also move, sometimes with a steady, dreamlike pull and sometimes with an addictive speed. His most recent novel, Await Your Reply, was published last year in paperback, and it’s a knockout – an atmospheric and dramatic story woven from three gradually constricting, and connecting, narratives.

Chaon has published two collections of short stories, Fitting Ends in 1996 and Among the Missing in 2001. The latter was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also published two novels, Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me (2004). His stories have been published everywhere, anthologized and honored widely. He teaches creative writing at Oberlin College.

Your work often plunges into the nature of identity — how we construct personae, the malleable nature of who we “are.” Do you set out to write about that subject or do you find it arising in a less intentional way?

The question of “intention” in fiction is always suspect, I think, because it works with image and narrative rather than argument and rhetoric. So there’s always a degree of Rorschach, an element of the unconscious in the “themes” that emerge. I don’t think that most writers get to choose their themes, so much as the themes choose them.

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Spokane writer and Eastern Washington University MFA graduate Shann Ray Ferch’s collection of stories, American Masculine, was selected last year for the prestigious Bakeless Prize and will be published this year by Graywolf Press. Ferch, who writes under the name Shann Ray, grew up partly in

Shann Ray Ferch, Bakeless Prize winner

Montana, where he was part of a family basketball dynasty, and now is a professor at Gonzaga University. He lives in Spokane with his wife and three children. His stories and poems have appeared in McSweeney’s, StoryQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, Best New Poets and Poetry International.

He answered these questions via e-mail.

Q: How long have you been writing stories, and how long a journey was it to this point?

I’ve been writing short stories since 1993 or so, though very haltingly for the first ten to twelve years.

Finally, I was accepted into Eastern Washington University’s MFA program, and the first few years there were very difficult for me because I needed to break myself internally in order to see more clearly what the professors were trying to help me see. I took six years to complete a strange and beautiful hybrid, a dual master’s in poetry and fiction. It happened basically by accident. Because of my life being filled with the grace and chaos of family and work, I chose to take only one class per term in general, which eventually meant I had most of the classes in poetry and most of the classes in fiction completed.

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The first time Faulkner went Hollywood

I’ve been AWOL here lately, occupied with day jobs and avocations. But I spotted a couple items online recently that fired up my barkishness (barkiosity?barkidoccio?). They’ve got me wondering:

1 – Would you write a novel for Snooki? I mean strictly as a money-making venture, a day job to support your bad artistic self? And if not, if you consider that whorish, (which is my first instinct but not my final one), why? Is is less whorish to work at a butcher shop or haberdashery or newspaper? The bills, they must be paid… I’ve been reading the Carver biography, and the financial desperation he and his family lived through is teeth-grindingly bad. Would he be more or less admirable if he’d done a project like Snooki’s book, rather than working as a janitor or half-assing teaching jobs while he was drunk?

2 – Regarding James Franco once again: WTF? He now is rumored to be interested in directing films of As I Lay Dying, one of Faulkner’s masterpieces, and Blood Meridian, a novel of horrifying awesomeness.  Can these be made into movies? By anyone?

The Snooki novel is real, and the writer Valerie Frankel collaborated on it. It already has a “famous fart scene,” which is the baseline standard for a work to be considered literary. Frankel discussed her work on the novel, “A Shore Thing,” in this piece at Slate:

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The muse is on vacation. So here is Tom Jones, dancing like hell.

If you’ve seen it already, watch it again. If you haven’t, don’t bail before 1:20…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UxU8s7Au0A

(Dan and Rachel — I am going to do my best to imitate this in Milwaukee. It will be my gift to you.)

I’m sure everyone with an hour to kill and an interest in writing has done this already.

Sort of alike

But I discovered who I Write Like this week.

Stephen King, with the occasional dash of Joyce, David Foster Wallace and Robert Louis Stevenson.

I always knew I was Stevensonish. The King thing I hadn’t realized. But who am I to say? I hadn’t yet figured out the following: 1) I write like David Foster Wallace; 2) Virtually everyone who ever wrote writes like David Foster Wallace; 3) therefore, I do not write like David Foster Wallace.

The web site I Write Like will analyze a passage of writing and say which famous author it resembles. I’m not sure how it’s done – I believe a “algo-something” may be involved – but it seems less than exhaustive. Using a semi-colon is a good way to score a David Foster Wallace, and using some short dialogue might get you a Raymond Chandler.

(Before I go any farther, a disclaimer: I know this is stupid. It is stupid and vain and fun.)

If you put in successive paragraphs from a single story (the level of my effort here is starting to embarrass me …) you will get a crazy array, mostly. Or I did, at least. I put several paragraphs of one of my stories into I Write Like, and this is who popped up: Stephen King, David Foster Wallace, Raymond Chandler, David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, Stephen King, Robert Louis Stevenson, King, David Foster Wallace.

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You probably know David Lynch is a filmmaker like no other — the guy who made Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, Elephant Man and others.

Lynch also has produced Interview Project, a web site that documents a cross-country journey, one personal story at a time. These short films give us the stories of people on the margins, typically unnoticed or bypassed by the vision of America we usually see. We learn about their childhoods, their losses, their triumphs, their beliefs, all in their own words. The films are often sad and moving — but they’re sometimes poignant in unexpected ways, as in the video below, where a flamboyant West Virginia man’s love of Stevie Nicks takes a turn toward sorrow and then toward strength.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC2PqmE9XNg

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Great Literature Retitled to Boost Web Site Traffic

The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World
8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The
American Dream
1 Weird Thing Caddy Smells Like

(Lacher also wrote this Short Imagined Monologue, titled “I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.)

With apologies to Lacher:

Lose pounds now — 17 Foolproof Strategies to Avoid Getting Money for Food

Dramatic Proof That a Sturdy, Religious Marriage is Superior to One Full of Passion and Intensity and Rash Acts in Train Stations

Whales die! Whalers die! Lone Survivor Spills Story

Anyone else?

As I culled my bookshelves recently – supposedly getting rid of books I will never read or do not want, only to find that I almost never put any books in those categories – I was struck by how many anthologies I have.

Just think what he might have accomplished with two ears

There are the bricklike Nortons, of course – about 50, it seems, from my various forays into higher education. There are lots of similar textbook-ish anthologies – of modern poetry, of Western poetry, of existentialism, of “American letters,” of flash fiction, of this and that.

Then there are some themed anthologies, collections that seem to promise something stranger or more various.

You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe is one of those – a collection in which authors write essays about their favorite short stories, followed by their favorite short stories. So we get Tobias Wolff on Carver’s “Cathedral,” Eudora Welty on Chekhov’s “Gooseberries,” Mary Gordon on Joyce’s “The Dead,” T.C. Boyle on Barthelme’s “The School” …

I was surprised, flipping through the pages of this book, how unsurprising most of the selections were. Easily more than half of these would be familiar to anyone who took a lit class or two.

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School’s out, as the great Mr. Cooper would say, for the summer.

So how ’bout a quiz for old times sake?

I’ve been pondering the necessity of artistic failure lately – trying to take comfort in the notion that even the best writers wrote bad books. Sometimes, my rationale goes, getting that bad one out of the way just makes room for the great one to follow.

So I put together a list of obscure novels by people who have also written massively well-known ones – not to equate popularity with quality, but trying to do this based on artistic merit presented a few too many problems that seemed insurmountable, at least in the time I had.

I wonder how many of these are truly obscure, and how many are simply obscure to me? As with the previous quiz, I think this is reasonably difficult. I’d be surprised if someone could get 10 of them right. I think I’d get six or seven, if I got lucky on a couple guesses.

Answers will be posted later in the day.

No Googling.

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I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like, and I like this guy: Baptiste Debombourg.

He’s French. I’d never heard of him before running across a link at Flavorwire. Here are some photos of his work. I can’t offer much interpretation or insight – my response to these, and my interest in offering them, is not unlike that of a toddler who found something fresh and original to look at. The artist offers some theory and explanation at his web site, but I find it doesn’t do much for my enjoyment of the art itself.

Enjoy.

This is a mural he created using staples.

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