McClanahan’s prose is unfettered and kinetic and his stories seem like a hyper-modern iteration of local color fiction. His delivery is guileless and his morality ambivalent and you get the sense, while reading him, that he is sitting next to you on a barstool, eating peanuts and drinking a beer, and intermittently getting up to pick a song on the jukebox. Check out Scott reading his story, “Kidney Stones,” in Atlanta here. Also, you can visit his website, or watch his stellar promo video for Stories V, in which he tell you about his baby.

***

The Rumpus: How long have you been working on Stories V?

Scott McClanahan: About six months. I’m not really precious about these things though. If you don’t like these stories I can write another fifteen tomorrow. Of course, my six months equals six years in the typical writer’s life. It’s all a matter of intensity rather than the amount of time spent on them. I’ve been engaged to marry people after only knowing them for just a half an hour.

Rumpus: Your fictional persona seems very closely linked with the real Scott McClanahan. I don’t want to commit the fallacy of conflating narrator with author, but your stories do seem to problematize the issue: they are very good at creating an effect of realism and, oftentimes, their narrators are actually named Scott McClanahan. In a recent interview you said, “Probably, if was I telling the truth, about 75% of the stuff I write about is just stuff that happened to me. Of course, what’s different with me is I try to live my life like a fiction.” Could you expand on that idea? On the ways in which your life influences your fiction and your fiction influences your life?

McClanahan: I would expand on it by saying this: I was probably lying when I came up with that answer (at least 83.2% of the 75% percent figure is a lie). I’m not even a man really. My real name’s Beatrice.

Rumpus: Tell me about Rainelle, West Virginia.

McClanahan: It’s the most horrible, joyous, disgusting, beautiful place on earth.   It’s the type of place where you can catch a lady peeing in her front yard one morning on your way to the school bus.   The one I caught didn’t even act embarrassed.  It’s the type of place where you see bumper stickers that say Earth First: We’ll Log the Other Planets Next.

I was scanning the Charleston paper the other morning and saw this little item. Charleston is about an hour from Rainelle.

Rumpus: Wallace Stegner once said in an interview with Richard Etulain that he thought that point of view was the single most important issue in fiction writing. Do you agree with that statement?

McClanahan: Yeah, I guess I would agree to a certain extent.  I’m not really sure why anyone would want to write in the 3^rd person in this day and age, unless they were writing about a living, breathing person. I think cinema is the real 3^rd person art form of today. I’m more interested in the idea of 3^rd person when it comes to biography though. Most of the big Barth/Pynchon/Gaddis novels of the last 40 years are just farts in comparison to the great biographies of the past couple of decades like Caro’s LBJ books, or Edmund Morris’ three volumes on Roosevelt. These works feel like modern day Illiad’s to me, in terms of sweep and complexity.   I think the “t-shirt” of biography hasn’t even been removed from these forms yet. There’s more to them than just left over belly button lint. Plutarch and Suetonius still feel like wild animals to me. The guys I mentioned earlier just feel like “novelists.” “Novelists” are pretty much the same thing as “insurance salesmen.”

So I guess just picking the right form is more important than even point of view.   I’m sure most writers spend their whole life in the wrong form (maybe me too).  Of course, I’m talking about biography as a “fiction” as well (which it is).

The Rumpus: What made you want to start writing?

McClanahan: Like most, I guess I just wanted to originate the future.

No, I think it’s more like a compulsion really along the lines of stealing a car or living life as a peeping tom.   I’m sure there’s a large deal of ego involved.   There has to be.   Think about it.   Okay, Nathanael West didn’t say it right, I need to add more.   Collette didn’t quite get it right.   I need to add my two cents.  Every word is really a big wad of loogie in the face of the past when it comes down to it.

Of course, there’s really no originating the future when we’re all speaking Mandarin Chinese in a hundred years or so.

So I guess I look at it on a more personal level.  Montaigne said he was writing for his future generations.   I used to write for Sarah, but she doesn’t really read anymore, so I guess I’m writing my books for Baby Iris (our kid) or the granddaughter of Baby Iris.

I don’t know why she needs to know it, but I keep compulsively writing it.   I used to have panic attacks so intense I vomited every day between the ages of fourteen and nineteen.   I still won’t stay over at people’s houses when I’m doing readings because I’m afraid they’re going to hear me in the middle of the night.

I guess I want her to know that I had a nervous breakdown when I was twenty five, and that there were days when I didn’t know whether or not I was going to make it (or even cared for that matter).

I want her to know I moved to Huntington, WV when I was twenty two and pretended I was Australian for a whole month.   I seriously pretended I was Australian and no one at the telemarketing place I worked even knew until I stopped speaking with an accent and people were going, “What the hell?   You’re not Australian?”

I don’t know how any of this shit is going to be a comfort to them, but maybe it will.

Rumpus: What is the best writing advice you were ever given?

McClanahan: I stay away from advice of any kind (either giving it or receiving it). It’s especially dangerous to take advice, if you ask me.

Imagine a writing workshop sitting around discussing two of the most famous sentences in the language.   Pretend these sentences don’t exist and you’ve just written them.

You write: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…”

The person giving the advice: “But do you need the clause ‘In the beginning’?  It’s the start of your book.   We already know that this is the beginning don’t we?”

You write: “To be or not to be: that is the question…”

The person giving the advice:   “I really wonder what would happen if you eliminate, ‘that is the question.’   We already have the question there.   I think it may be a bit repetitive if the question is being pointed out as a question.”

So phooey on advice. This whole German university system of classification and qualification is pretty silly in my book.

Rumpus: Who are your biggest influences?

McClanahan: I guess I could give you the “writer” answer here and say Witold Gombrowicz or Manuel Puig, but if I were to be honest I would say the red light on my way to work has a much greater impact on me.   It always catches me and pisses me off first thing in the morning.   So it’s either the red light or Pizza Hut.   If I had to pick between Puig and Pizza Hut, I would pick Pizza Hut.   The other night I ordered that new stuffed crust pizza and tried to eat the whole thing myself.   I failed and for the rest of the night I kept waking up with heartburn.   It had a much bigger impact on my work the next day when I sat down to write than Mozart’s Requiem or some crap like that.

Rumpus: Joseph Conrad once wrote:

“A novelist who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss…his calling…I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him impatient with their small failings and scornful of their errors…I would wish him to look with a large forgiveness at men’s ideas and prejudices…”

Do you agree with this idea?  That the most fundamental skill a writer can have is a sense of empathy?  A capacity to give “tender recognition” to someone’s “obscure virtues”?

McClanahan: That quote is as silly and full of purple as Conrad’s prose. Only a condescending ass thinks about mankind as having “obscure virtues,” or the need to point out to others not to feel superior to mankind. That’s someone who thinks he’s superior already.

I think writing is more like the Verlaine example. His mother kept all of her still-born children in jars of formaldehyde. She kept these sad little jars in a room of her house. One night Verlaine was drunk and he broke in and smashed and busted up all of the jars full of his still-born brothers and sisters. Then he ran away to Paris with his 16 year old boy toy or something like that.

That’s what writing feels like to me. I keep fighting the urge to set myself on fire really.  I’m not worrying about whether or not I’m “impatient” with someone’s “small failings.”

You have to watch those Polish dudes.

Rumpus: In Stories V you mention that you are “done with stories.” Is this true? What are you working on now?

McClanahan: Yep, I’m done. I’m just waiting for my book Hill William to come out. Hill William. Hill William, edited by the great Giancarlo Ditrapano (his aunt makes the greatest pizza in the world). Tyrant Books. Spring 2012. I spent more than six months on that one.

Rumpus: Who are you reading right now (give us a recommendation!)?

McClanahan: I just finished Brian Allen Carr’s Short Bus, which is amazing. I really loved XTX’s, Normally Special, and the Frank Hinton chap-book put out by Matt Debenedictis and Safety Third Enterprises.

I’m really looking forward to the new Michael Kimball book too.

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In his Believer review, Jim Ruland described Big World as, “a full anatomy lesson of the kind of heart that’s kick-started by booze, cigarettes, and jukebox songs of regret.”  Miller’s protagonists are often young, intelligent (and, at times, deeply sardonic) females engaged in some sort of destructive and/or deteriorating relationship.  What is perhaps most impressive about Big World is the way in which each narrative seems to vault effortlessly from the particular to the universal.

You can check out her flash fiction here at Storyglossia here and here.

***

The Rumpus: What book or writer first inspired you to begin writing?

Mary Miller: When I began writing, I was buying books at a chain store in Meridian, Mississippi; they only carried popular stuff and the classics.  None of it seemed to have anything to do with me, really.  Mostly the stories were written by men, but even those written by women were irrelevant.  Maybe the women were vaguely unhappy but they had parties to host, or else they had farm work to do.  Early on, it was the poets who allowed me to see what was possible: I loved Anne Sexton; I wasn’t crazy about Plath’s poetry but I liked The Bell Jar, and I knew she had killed herself so this automatically made her much more interesting.  I also stumbled upon Kim Addonizio and Laura Kasischke.  They made me realize I could write about the things that were going on in my head, that I didn’t have to be nice.

Rumpus: What is your writing process like?

Miller: I don’t like to think about process.  I write one sentence and then another, and I don’t ask myself what comes next.  I used to write one draft very slowly and then, if it needed to be revised, decide it was shit and throw it out.  I don’t do that anymore.  I save everything and piecemeal things together.  I’ve found that nearly everything can be useful; often things are just in the wrong form.

Rumpus: How long did you spend writing Big World?

Miller: I started writing fiction in the fall of 2005 and gave the manuscript to Elizabeth and Aaron in the summer of 2008.  The first story I wrote was “Go Fish” (published as “My Brother in Christ” in BW).  It feels really early to me now, like I was just working out my style.  I’d kind of like to rewrite it, but someone once told me to look at it as a document, a picture of who I was then.  I guess I’m going to have a lot of documents, which is cool since I’ve never managed to keep a diary.

Rumpus: In the her Rumpus Review of Big World, Laura Van Den Berg called you a “master of tone.”  And its true, Big World has such a cohesive and authentic tone.  Each narrative is distinct, but the cumulative effect is that of inhabiting (or having some sort of intimate conversation with) someone else’s consciousness in all of its complexity, which, I think, is one of the most uniquely magical experiences a reader of fiction can have.  Is that something you strive for?  Does tone come naturally to you or do you struggle to correct yourself when you lose sight of it?

Miller: It comes naturally.

I struggle with this because the tone is flat and most people don’t like to read about sad, depressed characters that don’t do anything because it’s too much like their real lives—things should happen and characters should do things and say things and create a lot of drama.  What makes this day different than all of the other days?  If it’s just another day, then it will be called a slice-of-life story, a vignette, and everyone knows this is an insult, like when one of your peers in workshop begins every sentence with, “I know this is a first draft, but…”

I try to figure out whether the story feels right to me, which I’ve gotten pretty decent at.  Sometimes static and depressed is good and sometimes it’s just dull and lacks energy.  Either way, I try to create a whole world; if it’s a sad, depressed world, it should still be detailed and rich and fully realized.

Rumpus: What is the best writing advice you were ever given?

Miller: I’ve been given a lot of great advice.  One of my professors recently said that writers should think of themselves as geniuses with much to learn.  This resonated with me because I really do think I’m a genius and I also think I have much to learn.  If you don’t think you’re a genius, you won’t have the guts/ambition/narcissism for writing, and if you don’t think you’ve got a lot to learn, you won’t progress.  You’ll also act like a jerk.

Rumpus: What do you think about the idea of “real fiction,” i.e., the conceit of the publishing industry/critical establishment that you can only write one book that is noticeably autobiographical and that your second book, if you are a really a writer of “depth” and “imagination,” should be a novel from the perspective of, I don’t know, a zebra or a man who lives in Latvia?

Miller: I don’t think much about the publishing industry.  I’m a short story writer so I don’t have to be a part of it, to a large extent.  When my fellowship is up in a few years, I might have to reassess things, but I’ll probably just get a job at a college somewhere and teach fiction and continue writing whatever I feel like.  If this doesn’t pan out, I’ll see if James Frey is still hiring.

Rumpus: What is the gestation process like for your stories?  Do they start with a character?  An idea?  A simile?

Miller: Never a simile, sometimes an idea, often a sentence.  The narrator is nearly always a thinly veiled version of myself so this takes some of the question out of it.  If the narrator isn’t “me” then it’s someone watching “me.”  It’s a very narcissistic world I live in.

Rumpus: In an interview with the Paris Review, Faulkner said of his contemporaries (and this is kind of a long quote):

All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide.

Do you agree with that statement?  Do you think you all writers strive for some permanently elusive goal?  That writing is like approaching an asymptote?

Miller: This just sounds like the kind of thing that sounds cool to say, perhaps while drinking whiskey and chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

I think of Hemingway, who was depressed and disoriented and had multiple rounds of ECT, how he found himself unable to write, unable to organize his thoughts into anything coherent.  This is what killed him.  If I got something exactly right, matched “the work to the image,” I’d be thrilled.  I would know it was a very rare occurrence, and that it would probably never happen again.  Then maybe I’d drink some whiskey.

Rumpus: What do you consider the most writerly city in the world?

Miller: New York, of course.  I think nearly every beginning/emerging writer would pick New York.  It would be amazing to live there, even for a summer, and pretend I was “a writer in New York” or a “New York writer.”  I like Austin quite a bit, though.  There are lots of readings and literary events and it’s all free or really cheap and everyone is nice.  And the Mexican food is excellent here.  I eat an avocado a day.

Rumpus: In Fast Trains you write:

I read an article about loneliness in a Jesus magazine while I ate. None of my coworkers believed in Jesus. We made fun of the earnest and plain-looking women who congregated in the religious section, one of them offering advice while the other protested mildly, their quilted bible covers in paisley prints. Sometimes I got the urge to join them. It wasn’t because there was something missing. The something missing was the plight of humanity—any idiot knew that—it couldn’t be filled with food or alcohol or drawing blood from skin.

When I read this sentence I sort of felt like it could function as a thesis statement for the whole collection.  Many of the protagonists share this sense of deep, existential loneliness.  One narrator remarks, I can’t remember where, that no one has ever really known her.  Do you think that fiction can, in a way, function as an antidote to this type of loneliness?

Miller: She says that she has successfully hidden herself from everyone she’s ever known—that still makes me kind of sad because I remember being in a relationship with someone who didn’t know me and feeling like I had to protect myself, to keep from being “found out.”  Basically, he just didn’t like me very much.  Now I’ve accepted the fact that someone is going to like me or they aren’t and there isn’t anything I can do to change that so I might as well be myself.  I’ve always thought that was the most horrendous advice, though—just be yourself.  As if the self is some static thing that a person can just be.

So the question—no, I don’t think fiction in any way makes loneliness better.  I think leaving the house makes loneliness better, participating in life.  I force myself to go to parties, to be nice to people and smile and make friends.  It’s all very uncomfortable, really, but it makes life more pleasant.

Rumpus: What would you say is your most common edit?  That is, what instinctual writing habits do you find yourself censoring most often?

Miller: I tend to go too far.  I think I’m saying something profound, typically at the end of a paragraph, but it’s obvious and functions more as an instruction to the reader, who doesn’t want to be told how to think or feel.  It’s tricky because I don’t want to cut what actually is insightful but I have a hard time telling the difference.

Rumpus: What did you want to grow up to be when you were little?

Miller: I wanted to be a writer.  I had this little cubbyhole bed built into the wall, and I would sit there for hours and hours reading Stephen King and scaring the hell out of myself.  Other than some sporadic poetry, however, I didn’t start writing until six years ago.

Rumpus: What book are you reading right now?

Miller: I’m almost finished with The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey, who will be at the Michener Center for the next three weeks giving craft talks.  It’s not the kind of book I’d have probably ever picked up on my own, but I’m really enjoying it.  I’m also reading Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels, which is amazing so far.  I love anything even vaguely apocalyptic.  If animals are dying and things are falling from the sky, this is excellent.  I’m also reading Cheryl Strayed’s Torch.  I just found Strayed and I love her—I bought Best American Essays 2000 and 2003 to read her nonfiction.  I tend to read a bunch of books at once, but I’m actually finishing them now.  For a long time, I was just moving them from room to room: bedroom to kitchen to living room and back to the bedroom at night to go to sleep.

Rumpus: What is the best thing about Mississippi?

Miller: I’ve been in Austin for about five months, but I’ve spent nearly all of my life in Mississippi.  Sadly, all of the young creative people who don’t want to get married and have babies by age 25 move away.  The few who remain are the ones who left, got hooked on drugs, and had to move back.  Then they sober up and get married and have babies.

What I like about Mississippi: thunderstorms, the blues, folk art, cheese grits, Square Books.  I like Southern accents.  I like being from somewhere that nobody gives a shit about; it makes me feel like an underdog.

Rumpus: In an interview with Nik Perring you said (vis a vis your own writing process):

There’s a lot of ‘Yes, I can do this,’ but then it can quickly turn into ‘There’s no way I can do this.’ When I sit down to write, I can feel both of these things in a span of ten minutes.  It’s really hard.  There’s a lot of time and energy put into writing hundreds and hundreds of pages of stories that go nowhere and failed novels.

Could you expand on this a little?  How do you overcome self-doubt?  Do you find yourself growing anesthetized to it the more you write?

Miller: When I wrote this, I think I was mainly talking about novels.  Over the years, I’ve attempted three or four, a couple of which made it to 150 pages or so.  At some point, it always devolved into a word count and it wasn’t fun and I didn’t enjoy it.  When people post their word counts on Facebook, I can’t help thinking that that’s all it is—it gets to a point where you just want to get to 80,000 words and be done with it already so you can work on something you actually like.  I’ve given up on novels for the time being and I feel very happy about that.  Now, if a story sucks, I’ll chop it up and use parts of it in something else.  Or maybe I don’t use it but at least I didn’t spend six months writing it.

Rumpus: What are you working on right now and when will we see it?

Miller: I’m finishing up a second story collection now, doing edits and things.  I also have a chapbook coming out with Rose Metal Press this spring—They Could No Longer Contain Themselves: A Collection of Five Flash Chapbooks by Elizabeth Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Sean Lovelace, and Mary Miller. It feels kind of weird to have these flashes out now because most of them were written about four years ago.  I still like them, though.  They know how to wrap things up in a way I can’t do now.

Rumpus: Finally, will you marry me?

Miller: I have a nice boyfriend but he lives a thousand miles away—so maybe, as long as we can skip the whole courtship process.

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Cunningham suggests, borrowing, ostensibly, from T.S. Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that almost all contemporary work is some sort of veiled translation of previous, canonical/mythical work.  We are the inheritors of a dialectical tradition that alters our work as our work alters it.

Apart from this ineluctable specter of precedence, there is the problem of getting down on the page what we actually mean to say.  We set out to write, Cunningham says and, in our mind, the novel is “transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth.  It is vast and mysterious and awe-inpiring.  It is a cathedral made of fire” and yet, by the time we finish, it barely resembles the initial idea we had in mind, whatever its etiology.  As Cunningham says, this journey, from ideal genesis to flawed final product, is a species of translation (and something of a parable).  How does one best transpose the topology of thought into language?

Additionally, Cunningham addresses the relationship between writers and their readers.  He emphasizes the need for literature to be worthwhile, “We have large and difficult lives…What the writer is says, essentially is this: Make room in all that for this.  Stop what you’re doing and read this.”  As a result, Cunningham says that we should always remember that we are writing for someone else and that that someone is looking to be entertained and inspired.  They are not only looking for what Chaucer’s host called “sentence and solas” (didacticism and pleasure) but they function as as active players in its construction.  Cunningham says, “One of the more remarkable aspects of writing and publishing is that no two readers ever read the same book.”  The reader translates the book into his/her “own lexicon,” gleaning whatever content is relevant to his/her life and discarding the chaff.  Whether or not meaning is immanent in the text or the reader (cue post-structural vs. structural debate), the role of the author, in Cunningham’s opinion, is to get as close to producing beauty and truth as possible.  We exist, Cunningham says, under that “condition of hope” – forever translating; forever pursuing whatever idealized and true-hearted vision we might have, at the best of times, in our head.

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Lehrer begins by briefly summarizing the “neural anatomy” of how we read: we have a “ventral route,” which, for a literate person is instinctual, quasi-unconscious reading and a “dorsal stream” which we use whenever we have to pay conscious attention to a particular sentence or passage (more commonly known in academia as “close reading”).  Lehrer then claims that hard-copy texts force us to read consciously (or activate our “dorsal stream”) in ways that streamlined e-texts do not.

Lehrer argues:

Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica and rendered on lucid e-ink screens are read quickly and effortlessly. Meanwhile, unusual sentences with complex clauses and smudged ink tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway.

Therefore, Lehrer concludes that e-texts are serpentine and menacing because they threaten to anesthetize our “dorsal stream” and, consequentially, eliminate our ability to read contemplatively.  And yet there seems to be a very clear distinction here between a text that causes one to engage his/her “dorsal stream” because of semantic difficulty (re: Faulkner) and a text that causes one to do so because of “smudged ink” (re: your Grandpa’s copy of Sherlock Holmes).  I would argue that the semantics of a text are far more likely to encourage thoughtful, dorsal thinking than a blurry letter and that e-texts do not, in any way, threaten that aspect of a text.  As long as we are engaging with dense and thoughtful texts for extended periods of time (as opposed to twittering about the Internet), I think we will activate our dorsal muscles regardless of the medium by which we read.

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In one of the videos Bradbury explains, unequivocally, how he made it to 90: “You have to love life completely.  I have been in love with life everyday of my life.”  The best way to describe Mr. Bradbury?  He is a pomegranate: “I’m a pomegranate. I’m a pomegranate! I have a billion seeds in me, I have a billion seeds poetry in me.  I have a billion seeds of stage plans, a billion seeds of screenplays, a billion seeds of novels, a billion seeds of short stories.”  Happy (early) Birthday Ray Bradbury!

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Interestingly, the most iconic coming-of-age-novel of my child hood, The Adrian Mole Diaries, was written by British author Sue Townsend.  Also, what about Great Expectations?

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Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford, examines the dialectic by which language both reflects and shapes thought. At the end of the article Boroditsky says that the next step in research should be an investigation of “the mechanisms through which languages help us construct the incredibly complex knowledge systems we have.”  Isn’t that what linguists (and later on, semioticians) have been doing since the beginning of the 20th Century?

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The novel takes place in a full-scale replica of Manhattan in Puget Sound (cue Synecdoche, NY comparison).  Boudinot explains how, in the novel, he strove to replicate Murakami’s ability to have, “concrete and fantastical elements peacefully coexist.”  Other influences: The Holy Mountain.

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