In popular military jargon, a “fobbit” is a pejorative describing a U.S. Army employee stationed at a Forward Operating Base, who avoids danger by staying put on the base. The novel has been compared favorably to other comic novels about war, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

***

The Rumpus: What kind of experience of war were you expecting when you deployed to Kuwait, and then Iraq, with the Public Affairs Office of the 3rd Infantry Division in early 2005?

David Abrams: Well, that’s the thing—when I got on that plane in Savannah, Georgia on January 2, 2005, I didn’t know what to expect. I’d been in the active-duty Army for seventeen years by that point, but had never deployed into combat. So, there was a little fear of the unknown churning around inside me, I suppose. My expectations, as it turned out, were different than the reality. I imagined I’d be living in some pretty hard, spartan conditions—working out of a tent, sand everywhere, not showering for days on end, etc. It turned out to be an office job not unlike all the others I’d had here in the United States. Except for the occasional mortar passing overhead, of course.

Rumpus: How did that feel? Was it disappointing in some way, or a relief?

Abrams: In a way, it was a relief, but it also took some getting used to. Of course, it only took about a day-and-a-half for me to get mentally acclimated and in the groove of the routine. Once you’re inside the wire, there’s a tendency for the war to slip away into the background. You can still hear it out there—the machine gun fire and the mortars—but it sounds so distant, at a far remove from your day-to-day reality of the office job.

Rumpus: Can you describe the place where you were working in Baghdad?

Abrams: I was at Camp Liberty (later called Camp Victory), and I was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, which was part of Task Force Baghdad. We worked out of this large headquarters building full of cubicles and air conditioning. The area surrounding our building once used to be Saddam’s hunting preserve, stocked with wild game which he and his guests would “hunt” on the weekends.

Rumpus: Did you have much interaction with the soldiers who weren’t primarily located in the air-conditioned headquarters building?

Abrams: As a rule, no. There’s a certain kind of insularity that envelops Fobbits like me when they’re working at the higher echelons. Many of the other NCOs and officers I worked with went “outside the wire” on a regular basis, and there were times when I interacted with combat arms soldiers from other units (mainly to interview them for stories I was writing or to prepare them for media interviews), but for the most part I was just a Fobbit surrounded by other Fobbits. If I have one regret about my experience over there, it’s probably that I didn’t go outside the wire into Baghdad and actually see the country I was supposed to be helping defend and rebuild.

Rumpus: It seems like such a strange way to be in a war. Reading the book, and listening to your answer, now, I’m thinking about Karl Marlantes’s and Tim O’Brien’s books about Vietnam, where the war was such an ever-present thing, and where home seemed so far away. That daily immersion seems interwoven with the moral reckoning both of those writers have had with the war. How did you begin to process the war, being in the middle of it, and yet not being in the middle of it?

Abrams: That’s a good question. Wars always evolve over time, don’t they? Iraq/Afghanistan is different than Vietnam, and Vietnam was different than Korea, and Korea was different than World War One, and so on. Some things remain the same, of course—one side fighting another over ideology or a patch of ground—but there are some aspects of combat life which differ radically than their predecessors. Nowhere was this difference more striking than the way technology has changed the way the military does business on the battlefield—a battlefield which no longer has any clearly defined front lines. There is no more “front” and “rear” where Fobbit-types would go to hide out in safer locations. In Iraq and Afghanistan, you engaged in a theater of operations that’s 360 degrees at all times. The modern wars are also omnipresent in our electronic media—to be cynical about it, we now have 24 hours of non-stop bloodshed available to us. The internet and real-time media reporting were integrated into daily life in Iraq. You’d have bloggers like Matt Gallagher (Kaboom) coming off patrol and sitting down at the keyboard to describe what just happened…you’d have soldiers being able to Skype-chat with their wives..and, if you were like me, you’d have Fox News on the TV—literally right next to my computer monitor—describing what was happening down in Firdos Square just as the Task Force’s Significant Activity reports were rolling into headquarters. It made for a very surreal, often disconnected, experience for me. It was hard to “process” the war while I was in the middle of it. I think that’s true for most soldiers. We only fully process what happened after we return home and see the war from the other end of the telescope.

Rumpus: Were there any differences between the war you were watching on Fox News and the war as you perceived it from Baghdad?

Abrams: For the most part, I think the media got the facts right. They were often on the scene first and there were many times you’d find a knot of officers huddled around a TV screen in Headquarters where I worked, watching live footage from downtown Baghdad, along with the Army’s feed from the “blimp cams” overhead. Where the differences came in was the patina of ideology which the news media laid over everything. There’s certainly a bias, to some degree, in the way the media portrays the military. I’m not saying that’s entirely wrong—the Fourth Estate is there to hold generals and colonels accountable for their actions and decisions—but having reporters on the scene, reporting in real time certainly complicates things for the military mission.

Rumpus: Were there ways in which you saw the writing of Fobbit as a corrective to some of the distortions—ideological or otherwise—that might have arisen either from media reporting, or from the public relations work in which the military invested?

Abrams: No, I wasn’t trying to write a corrective novel—that would just end up tasting like medicine, and I tried to stay away from polemics as best I could. I think that, if anything, Fobbit is my way of showing readers there’s another side to war—the backstage of combat, if you will. If you play a word association game with Americans and say “war,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Soldiers running across a battlefield through a hail of bullets, right? Rambo, smoke, explosions. In Fobbit, I hope readers will see something a little different.

Rumpus: I was thinking, though, of things like Fobbit‘s list of “Forbidden Words”—certainly, and usually in a funny way, you were showing the distance between the public story and the real experience. It wouldn’t be fit, the logic went, for Americans to hear words like “Iraqidocious” or “pretzel logic” or “metric assload.” The novel seems to refuse to sanitize the war, especially at the level of language, but also when it comes to questions of sex and video games and comfort and so forth.

Abrams: Sure, in that respect, I guess it’s an unsanitary account of the “business of war.” The careful choice of words, the scrubbing of language, the calculated images we presented to the external audiences—those were all major parts of my daily life over there. So, some of that is going to seep over into what I showed in the novel and—more importantly—how I showed it.

Rumpus: At what point did you realize the material you were gathering might be something worth turning into a novel?

Abrams: About midway through my tour in Iraq, when my agent sent me an email which said, in part, “I’ve come to believe that only in fiction will this insane war finally reach an American reading public.” From that point on, I think I started seeing my daily life through a different lens. I mean, I had a skeptical, cynical viewpoint from the start, but I think those words from my agent really gave me a little more freedom to do anything with this war, on the page, that I wanted. I could make it as loud and distorted as I wanted. I could paint it in images as large as a billboard. Sometimes you have to do this to get your point across.

Rumpus: There is an argument in the book about Catch-22, whose protagonist is called “that ass-clown Yossarian” by a West Point professor. It seemed to me that this book is really more in the tradition of Catch-22 than in the tradition of more recently fashionable novels and stories and nonfiction narratives about war (the Vietnam generation especially—Tim O’Brien, Karl Marlantes, Michael Herr, etc.). Was this a matter of your sensibility asserting itself, or is there something about our later wars that is better suited to the comic mode than to the tragic?

Abrams: I think it’s possible—perhaps even necessary—to find comedy in any war. I mean, look at the brilliant work which was done by Joseph Heller and Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H) and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Svejk—which I haven’t read, but have heard was funny). Seeing any war through the distortion of comedy is healthy. There is just too much absurdity and irony at play in a combat zone not to pay attention to it. At least that’s how it struck me; others may have had an entirely different war experience. As for how I approached Fobbit and made the style choices I did, all I can say is that one of my greatest literary role models has always been Flannery O’Connor. So not only did I deploy to combat in a Catch-22 frame of mind, I was also going to Iraq with some of O’Connor’s wit and sensibility coursing through my veins. O’Connor showed us how you can take something as sober and earnest as religion and punch holes in it until all the funny stuff leaks out. In the same way, I came at war sideways and wearing a jester’s hat. Just as O’Connor had her critics, I expect I’ll have mine for the light in which I cast the military.

Rumpus: The book ends in a terribly interesting place. I want to quote a little from the ending:

He ran without cease. His legs were hot iron bands and his lungs were breath-harshed sacs near collapse, but still he ran.

It was only when he was within sight of the Main Gate, the dark mystery of Baghdad lurking just beyond the bristle of concertina wire, that Chance Gooding realized he had no helmet, no flak vest, no weapon. He hesitated for a second but then tucked his bare head to his chest and continued to sprint toward the guards at the checkpoint who were even now bringing up their rifles and shouting for him to “Stop!”

Somewhere to the north, a mortar shrieked across the sky, coming closer, ever closer.

Even this is comic in its way. Comedy usually springs from the darkest places, and there’s a terrible irony to this ending. But there is also a moral weight to it. The reader immediately begins to think about the shelter of headquarters, and the disproportions that separate the warring forces, and the idea of a war that can be fought in part by men, but also in part by robotic machines handled by video game joysticks, and by bureaucratic functionaries who spend so much of their time creating PowerPoint presentations. In some ways, the action of the life-and-death things can seem like another form of entertainment. Certainly this war seemed—certainly not to Iraqis, but to many Americans at home—more like reality television than anything that came before. It was nothing like Vietnam, where everyone at home was horrified.

Were these the kinds of questions you hoped readers might be left to consider in the white space that follows the last sentence? Did you feel the weight of any sort of moral responsibility as a novelist of the war, or as a member of the military, or as an American?

Abrams: It’s disingenous for me to say that I wasn’t trying to write a moral novel. By its very nature as a novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit steps into the political conversation. There’s no way to avoid that. I can appreciate that readers are probably going to line up on one side of the novel or the other. I hope they go to those polar extremes, actually. If Fobbit leaves a reader feeling stranded in some bland in-between territory, then I haven’t done my job. But having said all that, I didn’t consciously write the book with a particular moral intent. I took what I experienced and processed it through the sausage factory of fiction. It’s up to readers to interpret what’s on the page—as is the case with any novel. Some will read it as anti-military, others will take away some empathy for soldiers. I don’t know if that answered your question about how this war was perceived as something close to reality TV. I think you’re right, though. This war was delivered to the public in a way that previous wars weren’t. Sadly, it did come across as “just another TV show” to many Americans. That’s a dangerous thing—having that disconnect from the horrible realities of war.

Rumpus: How do you think and feel about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and your participation in them, now? Did the writing of the book bring any new clarity to any of those thoughts or feelings?

Abrams: No, I think I’m still just as conflicted about the war as I always was. On the one hand, I was a soldier carrying out his duty, following his allegiance to his country and to the mission at hand. But yet, there was always this unease plaguing me. “What are we doing here?” “Are we really fixing this country or are we doing more harm than good?” And the most pressing question: “How do we pull ourselves out of this quicksand?” I think I’m still there in that white space you mentioned, trying to get clarity for myself on what this war did to us as a nation.

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Before all that, I was briefly a junior preacher (I wrote sermons on yellow legal pads overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway), then even more briefly a put-upon founding editor at a religious publishing outfit (I wrote solicitation letters to Irish people in a sterile office building in suburban northern Orlando, looking for someone to write a faith-based biography of Bono and U2, and eventually landed a university chaplain in Belfast, who went on to sell more copies of his book than I will probably ever sell of all of mine.) What was I looking for? In the immediate present, time, always time. In the ever-present “future,” some kind of romantic vision of the person I was not but might one day be. I was thinking Kerouac’s scroll and a subsequent ride cross-country ride on Ken Kesey’s bus; or Vonnegut’s butcher-paper-lined office at the University of Iowa, where sprouted Billy Pilgrim and the Nazis and a time-traveling race of aliens newly named the Trafalmadorians; or Barry Hannah bringing his handgun to his classes at the University of Alabama, blowing his trumpet at his students, shooting an arrow through the open window of the dean who cuckolded him. All these notions were new to me, because I was newly drunk on literature, never having read any of it (save a novel or two of half-understood Faulkner or Hawthorne or Hemingway in high school.) I knew nothing. I wrote two page stories in stolen four-hour blocks, sent them to the New Yorker, and waited patiently for a letter from David Remnick saying: “We recognize your genius, and oh how we have been waiting for it. Here is a check for five thousand dollars.”

This evening I tried to make a list of all the places I’ve written. I started with cities in Florida: Key Biscayne, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Lake Worth, West Palm Beach, Jupiter, Port St. Lucie, Vero Beach, Daytona Beach, Cocoa Beach, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Gainesville, Ocala, Pensacola, Wauchula, Arcadia, Ft. Myers, Ft. Walton Beach, Wildwood, Winter Haven, Brandon, Tampa, Leesburg, Lutz, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Bradenton, Lakeland, Lake Mary, and Lake Wales. Then states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee—38 states in total, to spare you the list. There was a swath of summer in Eastern Europe with a Polish-born buddy, now an American citizen by way of Sicily, a Montreal ghetto, Yale, Wall Street, Johns Hopkins, and Columbus, Ohio, where we cemented our friendship at the Blue Danube restaurant on High Street by sketching a plan to trace the course of the Danube River from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. We paid for it by writing a grant proposing we write a book of competing and contradictory accounts of the trip, but all we wrote were drunken postcards to people we admired, which we were smart enough not to mail from the post offices where we went so far as to address them, in Brasov, Budapest, Bucharest.

These days I’m fairly anchored to a teaching exile in Toledo, Ohio, for nine months a year. I’ve bought an old house and built myself a proper office, but I can’t shake the urge to move around, which seems by now to be a prerequisite for finding the language. I favor two coffee shops separated by an often-icy interstate loop, and a Mexican restaurant where I occasionally compose in the company of a mariachi band, and a sports bar where a kind former student sometimes brings me extra sticks of celery to cut the bite of the spicy sauce that coats the chicken wings I must buy to earn my writing seat among the parties of giant factory workers wearing the colors of the Detroit Lions or the Cleveland Browns or, godforbid, the Pittsburgh Steelers. I finished the last pages of my first book in the Jimmy John’s Sub Shop on the south side, right across the street from the Panera Bread from which I could occasionally skim Internet if the wind and the weather cooperated in carrying the signal from there to here. I composed those pages while sitting down, listening on the sub shop speakers to the same song (“Let It Bleed”) I’d played on my headphones while completing the book’s earliest story in a way that used to work but now seems crazy: One floor at a time, first to nineteeth, three hundred draft words per floor, bottom to top, in the now-demolished stairwell of the old Ohio State University library tower.

Isaac Adrien, who grew up in the orphanage and now helps run it, burns a pile of trash for sanitary purposes.

The summer gets the best of my writing now, my desk in an orphanage in a remote mountain village in Ouest Province, Haiti, where I’ve been working off-and-on for several years now on a novel about American missionaries and a narrative nonfiction book about a child-kidnapping-for-ransom. My Haitian models and teachers, many of them children, regard me strangely. Sometimes one of the children will ask, “Why do you sit and type all day while everyone else is doing work?” At those times, I look up from whatever atrocity I’ve been reconstructing in prose—the dechoukaj uprising, the little girl lost like a leaf in the river into which she’d fallen, the cemetery down the mountain path that cracked open in the earthquake and the bodies fell out—and see the reason why it matters to move my writing desk away from an easy place and into the less-known world that won’t give up its secrets to the comfortable. In those times, it is my responsibility as a human being to put down my pen and paper or my laptop computer, and walk outside, and hammer a nail into a plank, or watch a soccer game or a cockfight, or talk with a farmer, help throw the trash onto the fire, so that the dangerous used-up things—medical needles, bacteria-filled food packaging left behind by American visitors, toilet paraphernalia—won’t injure someone desperate enough to dig them up from where they would have otherwise been buried and use them to deliver a new dose of medicine, lick the last morsel of nourishment someone else was too wasteful to value, patch a hole in the wall where some rain is getting in.

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The Rumpus Book Club’s February pick is You Think That’s Bad, a new collection of short stories by Jim Shepard. For the last decade, Shepard has been an open and agreeable interviewee. Here are a few Rumpus favorites:

In 2004, while on tour promoting Project X, Shepard spoke with Robert Birnbaum about Charles Baxter’s “The Harmony of the World,” writing from the point of view of historical figures, and getting a fan letter from J.M. Coetzee.

In 2007, not long after the publication of Like You’d Understand, Anyway, Shepard had a conversation with Laura van den Berg about the liberties made possible by first person, the impulses informing confessionals (fictional or Catholic or both), the difficulty of omniscience, and the idea of “ethical passivity.”

Later that year, Shepard told Bookslut’s Weston Cutter that about the relationship between research and the stories that follow from research. “[Z]eppelins themselves don’t get me going,” he said. “[I]t’s the position in which a zeppelin can place somebody that generates the initial impulse for a story.

This 2009 interview at Vice Magazine finds Shepard interested in a 19th century notion that insects have personalities, the “feeling of awe” that rises from reading  Flannery O’Connor, and which works of Nabokov are more or less likely “to tilt more toward the game playing and away from the heartbreak.”

And just last November, Shepard spoke with the New Yorker about his new story “Boy’s Town,” and, in a theme common to many of these interviews, about writing about historical figures. (“Lately,” he says, “my fiction has often been inspired by real events, either from history or science or the news. Initially I read just to please myself: the happy odd person left alone with his peculiar subjects. But every so often a particular human dilemma within a situation sticks with me, and that emotional resonance that I feel in such cases suggests to me that I might want to try to inhabit the situation a little more fully, in terms of my own empathetic imagination.”)

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Not everyone at the Southern Baptist church believed so strongly in these things, but no one spoke up to say anything against them, either. And no one spoke up when the football players at the Christian school began to assault me daily in the school locker room. Sometimes I went home with blood in my underwear, which I hid from my parents out of shame, and several times a week I went home with my ears ringing because there is a way you can shape your open palm so when you slap somebody with it, their ears will ring, and all the other sounds will soften.

By the time I turned fourteen, I was in the market for a kinder variety of religion, and I was in the market for some friends, and I wanted to meet some girls who would pay attention to me. I found all three when my best friend invited me to Church in the Gardens in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. I was welcomed and embraced by the people there, not least the three young pastors — Greg Sempsrott, the senior pastor; Greg McCaw, the music pastor; and Jon McDivitt, the youth pastor. Within a year, I was spending all my free time at the church, and as much time as I could with all three pastors. I attended the college they had attended — Anderson University, in Anderson, Indiana — and I spent the summers interning as part of their pastoral staff. When I graduated from college, and Jon McDivitt left to work at another church, I took his place at age 22, as an associate pastor overseeing youth and young adult ministries at the church.

My tenure there was very short — less than two years. My college religion professors were good and responsible teachers, and what I had learned from them about the history of Christianity, the canonization process of the Christian Scriptures, the rigors of formal logic, the competing philosophies of religion, and, most of all, the ugly and contradictory history of the American version of Christianity I had been raised to believe was the one unimpeachable variety, troubled me as I began daily work in the church. What I saw and did while I was a pastor — encounters with illness, death, behind-the-scenes shenanigans, the troubling internal and external politics of the higher tiers of the national evangelical establishment to which I was being newly exposed — further complicated my view of things. (I wrote in greater detail about some of these experiences in my first major literary publication, “You Shall Go Out with Joy and Be Led Forth with Peace,” which appears in Random House’s Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers anthology.) I began to wonder if I really believed in the things I knew I was expected to say by way of comfort and instruction and as part of my job, and I began to wonder if I could reconcile them or even keep them in sufficient tension to enable myself to continue to call myself a Christian.

What I did was walk away, and not in any sort of brave way. I did not want to inflict my own doubts on others who seemed to be bolstered by their faith, so, in the language particular to that community, I said that my calling seemed really to be writing, and that I was going to leave pastoral ministry in order to pursue it. Then, over the next ten years, I made myself into a writer. In order to keep myself afloat, I did work for a time in religious publishing and in an admissions office at a Christian college, but I never did return to church, and in time I made my peace with my distance from faith, which was good, because by then I no longer had any.

What I didn’t want to do, however, was divorce myself from all the good relationships that remained from my years in the church. The congregation I served in Palm Beach Gardens, in particular, was full of good-hearted and relatively broad-minded people. Many of the uglinesses which were made so public during the years of the Bush Administration seemed far from that place, which was mostly populated by pragmatic, working-class people who, like me, had found a place to belong.

Foremost among these relationships was Greg McCaw, the music pastor, under whose tutelage I had learned in part the craft of ministry, how to play guitar and bass in an eight-piece band, and how to speak publicly in a way that made people feel the things you wanted them to feel. I spent two summers with him in high school, touring the country in a traveling music show, and I spent two summers alongside him in college, as a staff intern at the church. He was known for the lavish productions he staged each Christmas and Easter, which drew standing-room-only crowds to multiple performances that often featured live horses, an angel choir near the ceiling, and a bank of subwoofers sufficient to shake the cars in the parking lot.

He was also known for his willingness to conduct frank conversations about such near-taboo matters in that time and place as teenage sexuality, dating, masturbation, oral sex, and pornography. He was frequently criticized for this openness, but I would imagine the criticism mostly happened when he was not around, because Greg McCaw was and is a big man with a deep and commanding voice, and outsized personality to match — he was a traditionally masculine force — and he could be as intimidating when he was angry as he could be gentle and understanding when he was of a mind to be gentle and understanding.

On a couple of occasions, he confided to me that he struggled — that was the word he used — with attraction to other men. (He was, in fact, the primary model for the closeted preacher in my novella “A Love Story,” which appeared — to the chagrin of many people we both knew — in my debut book In the Devil’s Territory.) This attraction was something he kept close to the vest, because there were few things more threatening in the evangelical community of the time than same-sex attraction. Our church was considered especially broadminded (or weakminded and near-heretical, depending upon whom you asked) on the subject of homosexuality, because our senior pastor publicly welcomed gay people to worship at the church, the theory being that if they entered into a right relationship with God, in time God would enable them to “change their hearts” and be therefore delivered from their sexual desires. To be homosexual, the logic went, was no different in the eyes of God than to be an alcoholic or a drug addict or a liar or a cheat or a gossip, and let he or she who be without sin cast the first stone.

It is troubling to me, now, to enter into the consciousness of the person I was then in order to type these words which I hope will give you, Rumpus reader of whatever background, adequate context to understand the conversation that follows, because what I must confront in typing such words is that the person I am now is not separable from the person I was then. I will always be a person who was once a person who listened without comment or even emotion to talk such as: “They ought to round up all those faggots in San Francisco and stick them on that Alcatraz island and nuke it.” To the ears I have now, the comparison of a person’s sexual orientation to their heroin problem or their embezzlement problem, or even the casual invocation of the old archery term sin to describe the complexities of human behavior, is different only in degree, not in kind, from the faggot talk and the nuke talk. But I cannot deny that the process of coming out from under a couple of decades of indoctrination in what the world is and how it operates is a process, for most people, that is incremental.

This is one of the reasons that I wanted to interview my old pastor Greg McCaw. I wanted to get a sense for why it took him over forty years to come to terms with his sexuality, and I wanted to find out what it cost him. I already knew that his process of coming out had lost him close friendships, his closest relationship in the world (with his ex-wife Lori), and his livelihood —  churches of the sort he spent his adult life serving not being terribly open to hiring a gay and divorced pastor. But I also wanted to learn something about how he got here from there, and what it felt like to make such a significant life change, especially since in many ways his story seems to be one of the representative stories of our time. When I called to ask if he would agree to the interview, he was very happy to receive the call. He said he was working for slightly more than minimum wage as the night-time desk clerk at a chain hotel in Wilmington, North Carolina, and that he had become a volunteer leader in the local GLBT community and in a local church.

It was difficult for me to imagine him in a position so relatively powerless, but after we talked, I was reminded again that there are varieties of power that come not from one’s position in the world, but instead from one having something meaningful to say, and then having courage enough to be willing to say it.

***

Kyle Minor: I learned that you had come out on Christmas Day 2005. I was at my brother’s house in Nashville. My parents were there, and my wife and baby, and my brother’s wife. We opened the presents, we ate the Christmas meal, we did the Christmas ritual. Then my parents grew very solemn and asked us to sit down and said they had something to tell us. This was naturally very concerning. We thought someone had cancer or my parents were getting a divorce or some similarly unexpected thing. Then one or the other of them said: “Greg McCaw is gay.” Then we — me and my brother — started laughing. Because it was a relief. It wasn’t the big thing we thought it was going to be. But to my parents, the news was devastating, especially because you had been our pastor for so many years, and because it was unthinkable to them that you could be gay, and because you were leaving your wife Lori, a person we all loved and cared about. I’m thinking that if it was this difficult for my parents to take, it must have been even more difficult to people closer to you, from similar religious and cultural backgrounds, to accept the news, and it must have been difficult for you to share, knowing that you might be in for some difficult scenes. What was that time like, for you?

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Pinckney Benedict is the author of four works of fiction, including the widely acclaimed Town Smokes, and, most recently, Miracle Boy and Other Stories, which is currently longlisted for the 2010 Cork City – Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. His stories are widely anthologized in outlets including the O. Henry Prize Stories (twice), New Stories from the South, the Pushcart Prize series, the Oxford Book of American Short Stories, and the Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction. He lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where he is a professor in the English Department at Southern Illinois University. We talked about his writerly apprenticeship under the tutelage of Joyce Carol Oates, his love of genre, the literary politics of Appalachia, his departure from Nan A. Talese/Doubleday to publish with small presses, Christianity, graphic novels, and the possibility of future work in horror films.

***

The Rumpus: The first book of yours I read was Town Smokes, which was published to some acclaim by Ontario Review Press in 1987. Town Smokes was the book that was plugged on MTV and featured the story (“The Sutton Pie Safe”) that won the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, plus the title story, which was anthologized in the Oxford Book of American Short Stories. It’s a book that holds up these many years later, but one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s not much like the books that followed it. The fiction, which started in this kind of Breece D’J Pancake realist mode, has grown increasingly weird with each book, and this latest collection, Miracle Boy, is the weirdest of all, in its flirtation with all sorts of genres, including (a surprise to me) science fiction. What happened?

Pinckney Benedict: I’m very happy with the notion that my work has grown weirder with every iteration, so thank you for that. Town Smokes was very early work of mine, and much of it was, as you mention, open homage to Breece Pancake, who was the strongest of the various literary influences I felt as an undergraduate, which was the period during which those stories were written. I was very much a journeyman writer, very much aware that I was learning my craft, and models like Pancake’s work were invaluable to me.

The strangeness that has crept in – or more recently come roaring in, I think it’s not wrong to say – is probably the result of my beginning to feel, rightly or wrongly, that I own the craft part of the work now, and so I can look through that part of it; the sentences and the paragraphs and the shapes of the stories have, to some extent over the years, become transparent to me, so more of what comes through is actually me. It’s one of the reasons I’m as pleased with this new collection as I am: it’s the work of mine that – again, for better or worse – looks most like me, most resembles the geography of the place between my ears.

Rumpus: When you were writing those earlier stories – which you seem here to be characterizing as apprentice work to one degree or other, an assessment that seems ungenerous to me – was there a person or an institution or an idea of literature you were trying to accommodate or please?

Benedict: Almost all of those stories were written when I was an undergraduate at Princeton, in creative writing classes led by Joyce Carol Oates, and I was very consciously writing to please her. I don’t mean to diminish those early stories, or denigrate them, because they were, and are, very important to me – I simply mean to acknowledge that I was more powerfully influenced by models then than I believe I am now. And my collaboration with Joyce on those stories – I believe it’s fair to call it a collaboration, because she was an astonishingly generous teacher, and I still hear her voice every day when I write, feel her editorial hand on my shoulder, as it were – was amazingly fruitful. I used to write four or five stories a semester! A level of production that, quite frankly, I’ve never reached again.

And since I was riffing on Breece Pancake so steadily, I didn’t begin to acknowledge my debt to “genre” writers – like Stephen King, from whom I learned the central importance of rock-solid sensory detail; or Kurt Vonnegut, from whom I took away the virtues of aliens and joyous (and not so joyous) sexuality – until much later. Joyce, I think, would have welcomed such material, if I’d been able to pull it off, in her classroom.

At Iowa, though, where I went for graduate school, it was made very plain to me that experimentation with “genre” was forbidden. In fact, anything that made writing or literature enjoyable or fun – collaboration, collegiality, humor – were strictly on the no-no list. (I even learned later that Frank Conroy had told Joyce that I would be a far better writer if only I would abandon “that backwoods stuff” – even the “genre” of my home and my life’s material was of questionable literary value!) It took me a long time to recover from the bizarrely Puritanical edicts of that place, and a good bit of my enthusiasm for my current material, for the outre, for the elements of horror and science fiction, probably springs from rebellion and resentment – doubtless against a way of thinking that has passed away. I hope so, anyway.

Rumpus: It is interesting to hear this talk about “that backwoods stuff.” I’ll confess that I came to your stories first because I was much enamored with a writer from Haldeman, Kentucky, named Chris Offutt. At that time, I was trying to teach myself how to write, and one way I was doing it was by reading whatever good thing I could find, then looking up interviews with the person who wrote it, essays about their work – anything, really, that I could find in my haphazard way. And since Offutt was writing about the part of the country where I spent part of every summer with my wife and her family, and because he seemed to get it so right, I was astounded to learn that there was this whole backlash from a subset of scholars of Appalachia who seemed to object to any work that portrayed people as — well, from all I can tell, less morally upright than educated upper middle class white people from the East Coast. This seemed very curious to me. And since the other likely targets were Breece Pancake and you, I figured I ought to start reading both of you. Has this kind of talk found its way to you, and what do you do with it?

Benedict: Ah, yes, I’ve felt the lash of the Appalachian literati a number of times. My wife and I have a term for any work of fiction, and for some films, too, that fit the pre-made model of “proper” Appalachian writing: it’s all “The Quilt.” If I’d had more quilts in my early work, I’d have fared a lot better with those folks, I think. Some Appalachian scholars, I have to say, were most supportive. I think in particular of the great Jim Wayne Miller, who wrote a very generous and simpatico article about my story (from Town Smokes) “The Sutton Pie Safe.” That article helped some folks in that community see what I was up to more clearly than was possible amidst all the Sturm und Drang, and to see that it wasn’t bad, or libelous, and cruel, or mocking, as it was sometimes thought to be.

Interestingly, my more recent work seems to have found wider acceptance among at least a few of the folks who earlier didn’t much care for it. I’ve published a couple of the stories from Miracle Boy in the influential journal Appalachian Heritage, and even won their prize for best fiction in the magazine in 2007, for my story “Joe Messinger is Dreaming.” I’m not sure if the difference is in me or in them – we’ve all grown older, perhaps wiser, perhaps our teeth have just grown more dull – but I’m happy about it.

Rumpus: I’ve been wanting to ask you about the strange trajectory of your publishing career. In some ways, you’ve lived the charmed life: Esquire, Zoetrope, Tin House, twice the O. Henry Award Series, New Stories from the South, two Pushcart Prizes, a couple of books from Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, and the promise of two more, a novel and a story collection. But when the story collection arrived, it came from an unexpected publisher – tiny Press 53, out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and, across the pond, the independent Salt Publishing. It is easy to imagine all kinds of scenarios – everything from betrayal to aesthetic boldness (the freedom the small press can offer.) But I don’t want to imagine. I want to hear it from you: What happened?

Benedict: In its simplest form: I’m a slow-ass. I had a two-book contract with Nan, for a novel and a story collection, based on the manuscript of the collection as it was back in 2006 (I think), which is quite different – smaller, more conventional – from what Press 53 has brought out. Nan wanted, for what I believe were very sound marketing reasons, to publish the novel before the collection, so the stories languished while I worked on the novel manuscript, which is still incomplete.

When the great crash hit the publishing world (as it hit pretty much everything else), Nan – and many other publishers, I imagine, or at least comfort myself by imagining – had to drop incomplete and overdue contracts. Mine was one of those. She handled the whole thing quite honorably, and I was of course woefully behind with the novel.

So my agent went out with the story collection, to every house that we could think of in NYC and some other places, high and low and in-between. Nobody bit. It was a terrible time for story collections. And as the rejections came in, I thought to myself: Laura (my wife) and I have done two anthologies with Press 53, and they were both highly enjoyable experiences that ended in the creation of what I believe to be worthwhile collections of literary art. They were fun! None of my publishing experience with Doubleday was ever what I would have called fun. So I withdrew the collection from the small number of folks who still had it and sent it to Kevin Watson, who seemed pleased to receive it. And we began to figure out how we would publish the book.

What I’ve ended up with beats every publishing experience I’ve had since Town Smokes came out – also from a small, dedicated publisher – all those years ago. It’s a robust book of stories, the cover looks wonderful (one of my great friends took the photograph and my wife helped design it), and I feel pleased whenever I talk to my publisher, because he’s truly happy to have me in the Press 53 stable. I don’t have to feel apologetic for having produced a book of short fiction that will obviously have quite a limited audience. And I don’t have to wait for the novel to be finished (in my slow-ass way, I have to admit: when will that be? I don’t know) and the whole publishing cycle to run twice before I saw this book come to fruition.

Hope that doesn’t sound like protesting too much, but I feel like a fellow to whom has happened what he would once have considered the worst possible fate: to be dumped by a prestigious publisher for a failure wholly on his part. (Once upon a time this occurrence would have made me, quite literally, suicidal.) And come to find out, it’s really quite a blessing. I love it when a story has a sticky sappy happy ending, don’t you?

Rumpus: A few weeks ago, I participated in an online roundtable sponsored by Dan Wickett’s Emerging Writers Network, about Miracle Boy. I was there, I’ll admit, to throw around phrases like “mechanical rabbit” and “Chaucer-meets-Gogol-meets-Donne-meets-Ray-Bradbury-meets-Albert-Goldbarth somewhere in the back corner of the library, where Jim Shepard is crouched empathetically over his history books and Nabokov runs his magnifying glass over his butterfly collection.” So I was surprised when the talk quickly turned to what seemed to many of the readers to be the explicitly Christian themes in many of the stories, to which there seemed to be a knee-jerk response that somehow precluded good reading. I’m susceptible to that kind of thing, too – evangelicalism is the community I fled – but your work doesn’t seem to grapple with these matters in the reductive sort of way about which even a reader as grumpy as me might gripe. Since the stories clearly have invited the conversation, I’d like to hear more about where the interest in these themes – which seem to have been deemed universally unsexy by those who declare what literature is – might have come from, and what it is you might be saying or not saying.

Benedict: First of all, bless Dan Wickett for all the good he does in the world, and bless you for taking part in that panel. I was a bit surprised, I have to admit, by the vociferous objections to the Christian material picked up by the keen noses of some of the other panelists. I think one guy even said that the ending of “Miracle Boy” was so saccharine that it would have made Flannery O’Connor puke, or some such! I got a big laugh out of the notion. The story was, of course, originally published in that great evangelical Christian magazine Esquire, edited by the Right Reverend David Granger, and plucked from obscurity by Sister Adrienne Miller . . .

To stop being snarky for a moment: I am a Christian, for what it’s worth, and that’s not an identification I shy away from. It’s not surprising, then, I don’t think, that my most deeply held beliefs influence my work. How could they not? I assume the same is true of other folks, whatever their beliefs may be. I certainly hope we’re all writing about those things that matter most to us. And, of course, the part of the world in which I grew up is steeped in traditional American evangelical Christianity, so it’s not just a concern of mine: it’s the milieu in which all my characters have spent all their lives. It would be bizarre if they didn’t frequently think in the language of the King James Bible. It would be bizarre if they didn’t frequently think about Jesus as a real person, as a being who has an intense and personal interest in their lives. How could they not?

I hope, though, that my thinking and writing on the subject is not reductive, to use your (very good) word. I’m not a simpleton (however much I may come off as one, and however much I might at times prefer to be one), and neither are my characters simpletons. They’re complex folks who come from a very specific background, and they reflect the influences of that background. Since it couldn’t be otherwise, I can’t worry all that much about the gut-level reactions of folks who, for whatever reason, hold unpleasant opinions of Christians generally, and simply don’t care to read about them. God knows, Christians have done much to earn the distrust and disdain with which much of America (and particularly the highly educated and the literate) views them.

Rumpus: For awhile I was reading the MySpace page you operated until last year or so, and what I was following the most was the progress reports about your work with computer-assisted comic-book-style storytelling. I’ve seen a couple of finished pieces, most recently in the online noir magazine Plots with Guns. How committed are you to this new (for you) form of storytelling, and do you have any ambition to make something book-length?

Benedict: I greatly enjoy making these graphic fictions, for which I both write the scripts and make – perhaps “cobble together” is a better phrase – the pictures. I’ve always loved comic books, and I’ve been pleased to see how fine many graphic novels are: at least the equal of more conventional prose novels, in the best cases. That said, I see these pieces as diversions from the principal body of my work, which is my stories, in much the same way that I see the work I’ve done on film scripts as a (sometimes quite lucrative) diversion. I learn something with every new project that I then take back to my “legitimate” work.

It’s also vastly painstaking labor. As slow as I am with prose, I’m that much slower with the graphic stuff. I’d love to do something full-length, yes, very much so, but I’m realizing as I go along that, to make that work, I’d have to have a collaborator, someone to undertake the graphic side of things for me, or at least to handle the bulk of that work. Ten pages I can do. Even twenty or thirty, as in the case of “Orgo VS the Flatlanders,” which is the longest and most ambitious graphic work I’ve done so far; but more than that would lay waste to me.

But I do love the way the form frees me in some magical way from the more linear expectations of my fiction. I love the feeling that I can mix many different elements together, as I conflate medieval Japan and eastern Kentucky in “Kentucky Samurai,” for instance. That’s a sensibility that I want to keep taking back to my stories: the freedom! We can do anything. There’s nobody there to stop us. Nobody cares enough to stop us! Isn’t that great (in kind of a sad way)?

Rumpus: Given the state of publishing now (whatever that is or might soon become, but I’m thinking of the decline of print that has been so widely forecast, and the rise of the independents, and the new vitality or new decline all of this will cause in literature, depending upon whom you ask), it seems to me that you’re in a space of extraordinary freedom, since you’re beholden to no one, and since Southern Illinois University is paying the bills, and since you have a readership that has already proven itself willing to follow you to unexpected places. What do you plan to do with this freedom? What’s next for you, I mean, and what’s next for your work, and what are the big or small things you still want to achieve as a writer, or, more broadly, as a maker of things?

Benedict: You’re right about the freedom I enjoy, although the parlous state of Illinois’ finances right now ($12 billion in the hole – or is it $13 billion?) makes me wonder how long such a condition can last. The worry of freedom, of course, is that we can waste it or fritter it away, and I often curse myself as I go to bed at night for not having done more with all the resources at my disposal, and I rise up each morning declaring that today I’ll make good on all the excellent fortune that’s befallen me.

The project I’m most immediately interested in right now is a low-budget Canadian horror film that’s in prospect. It’s with Cite-Amerique in Montreal, the production company that made the one film that’s been made from a script I’ve written. (I’ve done a number of commissions, mostly literary adaptations, for Canadian, British, and American film companies, but only this one has made it to the screen – Four Days, with Kevin Zegers, Colm Meaney, William Forsythe, and the astonishing Lolita Davidovich, on whom I will forever have a schoolboy crush.) I suppose I’ll hear this week or next whether I’ve got that job. It’s a bit tough, given laws in Canada regarding Canadian content, for them to hire an American screenwriter.

But low-budget horror, with an imaginative director (and the director they’ve got for this film seems very bright to me), seems like a pretty good fit. I gather that my long story “The Beginnings of Sorrow” (which ended up in a massive horror anthology) impressed them with my my “horror” chops. I’m a low-budget kind of guy, an appreciator of exploitation films of even quite a squalid kind.

I’ll finish this novel one day, but I’m not – and certainly the world doesn’t seem to be! – in any kind of rush. For now, I’m taking the next thing that looks likely, the next thing that will pay even a little bit, the next thing that will teach me some discipline or new approach for my fiction.

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A community college professor tries to teach Emily Dickinson to his students at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville is a tangle of strip malls and fast food restaurants. Bowers gets over-entangled with his students but doesn’t seem to realize it, nor does the essay. The reader wishes the reader had ever had such a teacher, although the teacher doesn’t seem himself to think he’s all that much of a teacher. Bowers teaches the poems but quickly defaults to teaching Dickinson’s biography, in hope of stirring up some love for the poems, but his talk of her reclusiveness provokes the language from which the title is drawn:  “She sounds like another freak. Seems like all we read in here is freaks.”

That’s the plot summary, which does nothing like describe the electricity of the prose. I read it on the newsstand at the Barnes & Noble in Lakeland, Florida, on my way from a dreary meet-and-greet in Tampa to my home base of Lake Wales, where my job was selling high school students on a third-rate college education. I wanted so badly to be a person who could make another person feel the way William Bowers had just made me feel.

I cyberstalked him all the way to Pitchfork Magazine, where he mostly reviewed indie records, but where he also had started a regular column ostensibly about music which seemed mostly an excuse to rearrange the base syntax of the English language. His return email address conflated fear and hamburgers. He said he would be my teacher, but it took him a long time to return the essays I sent him, most likely because the work was dreary. But he called me on the phone to talk about the line by line, and he said, “Why don’t you read some different books?” and he gave me a list I suspect was half purloined from Padgett Powell, the other half from some blue-skinned alien race. Even though I had read three hundred books that year, that was the month I discovered language.

The gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote about “All We Read is Freaks” on Page Six in the New York Post the next week, and then Bowers sold a book-length workup to either Harcourt or Houghton Mifflin. Even though it wasn’t supposed to be released until 2004 or 2005, I checked the Amazon.com page every day to see if by some miracle my pre-order had shipped. But it never shipped, and it never was published.

The Oxford American went out of business, then came back into business, then went out of business, then came back into business again, but they never bothered to put the article up on any of their latter day websites. I checked out a copy from the Lake Wales Public Library but lost it when my canoe overturned on Lake Pierce and I had to pay for the replacement, which never showed, since the Oxford American was at that time out of business. I bought a copy off Ebay and once I moved to Columbus, Ohio, I pressed it on everyone I saw, which was a mistake, because you can’t trust people who like to read, and they kept trying to steal my one copy, and finally somebody stole it so thoroughly there was no getting it back.

William Bowers

I got two master’s degrees, and my wife birthed two babies. After awhile I published my first book, and my pride in it was tempered by the knowledge that somewhere on the blue Earth, whether written down or not, some book-length book or idea of a book or mythical nine-headed beast titled All We Read Is Freaks was always going to be better than my book or the best book I would ever make, even if I lived to be ninety-two and won whatever might then be left of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I got to thinking that maybe it was better I had lost my copy of “Freaks,” because maybe by dint of age and fatherhood and reading too many books, I had physiologically lost the capacity to feel the thing it made me feel the first time I read it, and that was the kind of knowledge I could not bear without a treasured part of me dying. Bowers kept writing for Pitchfork, and he wrote reviews of theme park rides for an amusement park trade magazine, and for five years he maintained a blog of illegal MP3 downloads of mashups and obscure covers and just generally the kind of stuff you wish was in William Shakespeare or the Bible, but of course it’s not, and then one day I guess somebody from the RIAA or whoever wears the badge these days came along and shut down the blog (Puritan Blister, it was called), and, just like when that book never got published, a little more of what little joy there is in the universe got leeched away, and I don’t think there’s ever getting any of it back.

***

Please enjoy “All We Read Is Freaks,” by William Bowers, reprinted with permission here on The Rumpus.

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“In a few weeks, the international media will leave the country, and Americans will be free to forget about Haiti once again. It is my hope that this story will give American readers a glimpse into the lives of people I have come to love in Haiti. We must not forget them.”

On January 17, 2007, a gang of armed kidnappers broke down Francky and Tania Désir’s front door near the village of Callebasse, Haiti, in the mountains just south of Port-au-Prince. They abducted the Désirs’ 2-year-old daughter Fabby and held her for $200,000 ransom. For 5 days, the Désirs did not know if they would ever again see their daughter alive. Francky Désir negotiated the ransom down to $5,000, borrowed the money from relatives in upstate New York, and delivered the ransom to the kidnappers in Delmas. The next day, his daughter was released on the street nearby. Her clothes had been stolen, and she was severely dehydrated because  she had been given little to eat or drink except moonshine. She was afraid for her life, but she was otherwise unharmed.

For the last two years, I have been traveling to Callebasse to work on a book about Fabi Désir’s kidnapping. While there, I often stay as a guest at the orphanage where Tania Désir used to live, and which she and Francky now operate. When news came last Tuesday, January 12, that a 7.0 magnitude earthquake had hit Haiti, my first thought was of the orphanage. What about the children who live there, and what about Tania and Francky Désir? Were they alive? Were they safe? Was there still a roof over their heads?

Francky and Tania Désir

Information came in dribs and drabs, some of it good, some horrible. The orphanage was still standing, but many of the other homes in Callebasse had fallen, and many in the village were dead. All the children at the orphanage were safe and accounted for. Tania was safe, and Tania’s children were safe. Francky was missing. He had driven a truckload of men to a church meeting in Port-au-Prince the morning of the earthquake, and no one had heard from any of them.

In first days after the earthquake, the television showed horrible scenes, most of them from Pétionville, the richest and best-constructed city in the country. The streets were full of rubble. Bodies lay dead beside fallen buildings. Men with sticks and shovels tried to rescue the people trapped inside.

Then worse news. The Hotel Montana had fallen on its occupants. The Caribbean Supermarket was down. The National Palace was down. These were bourgeois places, the places where foreign dignitaries slept and the richest families shopped for imported ice cream and President René Préval governed. If the earthquake was sufficient to topple these well-built places, what of the cheap concrete and tin-roofed squatter houses in the bidonvilles on the unstable rises overlooking Pétionville? What of the shantytowns alongside the open sewers of Cité Soleil by the water? What about the impoverished cities of Carrefour and Léogâne, near the epicenter of the earthquake? What of the remote mountain villages like Callebasse just hours from Port-au-Prince?

It was not difficult to foresee the worst: International aid would reach the city first, get bogged down in the transportation, security, distribution, and other logistical snags that would greet the first responders, and never quite reach the countryside.

Yet if I had to choose a place to ride out the aftermath of a devastating earthquake—in the city or in Callebasse—I would choose Callebasse. The people I knew there were survivors. They grew their own crops, raised their own rabbits and chickens, and believed in replenishing the local forest. They lived through the fall of the Jean-Claude Duvalier regime, the dechoukaj uprooting, the so-called political times surrounding the rises and falls of the priest-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the terror of the kidnapping gangs out of Cité Soleil, and the hurricanes of 1998 and 2008. What man and nature destroyed, they rebuilt.

And if I had to bet on a single survivor, I would bet on Francky Désir. In the last three years, he had lived through many nightmares—his life threatened, his dogs poisoned, his trucks and guns stolen, his daughter kidnapped—and yet he went to work daily, driving his truck up and down the same mountain roads along which his tormentors had taken his daughter, so he could shuttle supplies between the village on the mountain and the city below. He was the neighborhood taxicab driver, offering free rides to town to anyone who asked. He was the neighborhood ambulance service, on call 24 hours a day, to bring the gravely ill and injured to the nearest hospital in Fermathe. And he was the neighborhood’s chief mechanic, able to build one new truck component from three old, broken, and mismatched parts. In his downtime, he was turning his house into a walled, armored, and iron-gated fortress so no one would harm his family again.

A day passed with no news. Then, Wednesday evening, a new report: No one had heard from Francky, but now the roof was caving in on the house he was fortifying. Tania and the children were sleeping outside, in the open area of the yard, for fear that aftershocks might topple the house or the wall around the property and crush them.

At 8 AM on Thursday, January 14, the phone rang, with good news: Francky was alive. Then the bad news: The truckload of men he delivered to the church meeting had died along with everyone else in the building, 40  dead altogether. Francky would have died too, except that his truck developed mechanical problems on the way down the mountain, and he skipped the meeting to buy some parts downtown.

One danger of writing a dispatch from the moment is you don’t know what is going to happen next. I continue to fear for the safety of my friends in Haiti—I am afraid to hope too much—and I plan to return to the country as soon as flights resume to see them with my own eyes and to offer whatever help I might. For now, I offer an excerpt—the story of Fabby’s kidnapping— from a book now less close to being finished. The village of Callebasse must be rebuilt. The ill and injured must be tended. The dead must be buried.

In a few weeks, the international media will leave the country, and Americans will be free to forget about Haiti once again. It is my hope that this story will give American readers a glimpse into the lives of people I have come to love in Haiti. We must not forget them.

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“I generally don’t use tape recorders. I take notes and work from memory. You can use the tape recorder as an aide-memoire, but I can tell you that I have been doing this for thirty years, and I’ve never had anyone challenge a quote. And I never quote what people have actually said. I quote what people remember having said. I try to create a fair rendition of the point they were making in the spirit in which it was recounted.”

Weschler portrait by David Hockney.

Lawrence Weschler is widely regarded, alongside John McPhee, Calvin Trillin, and William Langewiesche, as one of our foremost practitioners of literary nonfiction. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker for twenty years, retiring in 2001 to direct the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. His books include Vermeer in Bosnia, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Boggs: A Biography, Calamities of Exile, and, most recently, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.

MINOR: Do you mind if I record you?

WESCHLER: Sure, but I don’t like using a tape recorder. A straight transcript of a conversation invariably falsifies what happens in two ways. First, every reporter knows that all the good stuff happens after you turn off the tape recorder, so there is obviously something that happens when the tape is running that does not when it’s off. But beyond that, the transcript only records the words. There is a whole subset of communication—gestures, the language of the body, facial expressions—taking place that is not words, and when you take that away, you have in fact falsified what has taken place. You might have had a very interesting, articulate conversation with someone, but when you read the transcript, what you find is not at all articulate.

MINOR: So how does one record information?

WESCHLER: I generally don’t use tape recorders. I take notes and work from memory. You can use the tape recorder as an aide-memoire, but I can tell you that I have been doing this for thirty years, and I’ve never had anyone challenge a quote. And I never quote what people have actually said. I quote what people remember having said. I try to create a fair rendition of the point they were making in the spirit in which it was recounted.

MINOR: The bigger issue, I suppose, is how one convinces other people to reveal information about themselves.

WESCHLER: Way back in college I had a marine biology teacher who learned I was just floundering on this big, amorphous topic, and I told him I was struggling, that I didn’t know what I was doing. And he said, “When you’re doing a big essay, it’s like you’re walking on the beach and you come upon a dead sea walrus and you’re curious about how he died. You can do one of two things. You can pick up that piece of driftwood over there and start bashing the flank. And all you are going to do is make blubber and hash of him. Or you can pick up that driftwood, go sit down on a boulder, pick up a rock and start sharpening the driftwood. It will take all afternoon, but by the end you’ll have a blade. Then you can do the autopsy, and in five minutes you’ll know what happened.” So when you’re dealing with a huge, amorphous subject, it’s best not to ask huge, amorphous questions. Better to spend ninety percent of your time honing the questions, and after awhile the subject will open up.

MINOR: In Vermeer in Bosnia, you write, “It’s one of the great things about great works of art that they can bear—and, indeed, that they invite—a superplenitude of possible readings, some of them contradictory.” Could the same be said of your own work, or of the literature of nonfiction in general?

WESCHLER: I want to get rid of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The class I teach at NYU is called “The Fiction of Nonfiction”, and it is less a class about reporting methods than it is about the fictional methods that can be applied to nonfictional writing. It presupposes that the writer will try to be fair, but also acknowledges that there is no such thing as objectivity, and revels in that fact. Then we get down to business and talk about all the stuff that’s interesting: form, freedom, irony, voice, tone, structure. We are looking at masters—Ian Frazier, Jane Kramer, John McPhee, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell—and if you look at their books, absolutely they are works of literature. What drives me crazy is that my books are spread all over the bookstore. My Boggs is in Economics, my A Miracle, A Universe is in Latin America. This book here (holds up a copy of Vermeer in Bosnia), who the hell knows where they’re gonna put this. I was in a Barnes & Noble somewhere and looked for Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders and found it in New Age Psychedelics. And it’s not just me; the same is true of Ian Frazier and Jane Kramer and so forth. The point is that they should be in alphabetical order, in Literature. It’s not just that my books have a superplenitude of meanings, but that they are designed to illuminate each other. Boggs and Mr. Wilson, for example, even have the same type face, the same trim size. They’re meant to be read side-by-side, but no one ever knows that.

MINOR: What kinds of things do your books say about each other?

WESCHLER: I’m interested in people or places that were moseying along in the everydayness of their lives, and they suddenly caught fire, and their lives became different than they thought they would be. That’s not only interesting on an artistic level, but also on a political level. When it happens in individual lives—Dave Wilson, Harold Shapinski—it’s almost comical. When it happens to a whole country, when a whole polity catches fire, it’s enthralling. When it happened in Poland, people said that Solidarity was the embodiment of the subjectivity of the Polish people. People who throughout history had been content to be treated as objects suddenly demanded to be treated as subjects. Repression consists of taking people who had been treated like subjects and turning them into objects, and the resistance was that refusal to be turned back into objects. So what is pervasive across my body of work is an interest in objects becoming subjects and what is involved in asserting that, or in the case of Vermeer, inventing that, dealing with all the forces that mitigate against that intention. And what becomes interesting, then, is an awareness of the workings of grace. You work and you work and you work, and then it is as though whatever happens, it happens by itself. It never would have happened without all that prior work, that preparation, but that prior work did not make it happen.

MINOR: What are some examples of these workings of grace?

WESCHLER: Solidarity is a good example. All the activists who spent the years of the Seventies in jail—all those years preparing for Solidarity—when August 1980 happened, it blew their minds. They had no idea why it happened. They acknowledged that it would not have happened without the prior work, but that the prior work did not make it happen. It was that plus something else. On the artistic level—you know this from your own writing—you work at something and it’s not working, it’s not working, it’s not working—and then suddenly it works. You’re in the zone. And that’s all very mysterious and very interesting to me. There’s something important going on there, and it’s unclear exactly what it is. The word grace comes from gratis: for free.

I’m very interested in Socratic artists, people who make you say, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? How is it that we are able to fly at all?” I love artists who can throw you into that state of perplex. In the case of the Mr. Wilson book, I endeavored to replicate the experience of going to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, where you’re reading the captions (beneath exhibits), where after awhile you ask yourself, “What the hell is going on here?” There’s that sense of slippage across media that’s very interesting to me.

MINOR: Vermeer in Bosnia ends with a short piece—something you call a convergence—in which you put a poem (Wislawa Szymborska’s “Maybe All This”) into conversation with a painting (Vermeer’s Lacemaker), and this ending also seems like a beginning, as you have published many more convergences since the book was released. Is the convergence a new literary form, and if so, what does it offer the reader and the writer?

WESCHLER: I offered that piece to a lot of places—The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s—and no one wanted it. But I’ve come to see it as sort of a natural form, something haiku-like, and I would love to see other people try it. It’s not a form original to me. When I published the first one, I was sure to give credit where credit is due, to John Berger. After Che Guevara was killed, Berger wrote an essay that began with that famous photograph of the general. He said that we all know where this photograph came from. It’s based on Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, a painting which is hotwired into everyone’s brain. That painting taught the general where to stand, the photographer what angle to take the picture from. The subtext—Che as Christ, as resurrection; the corpse of the thief in Rembrandt alludes to the corpse of Christ—taught me something. That was a huge, formative event for me. I think that’s how we tend to think anyway, but our thoughts are muffled by so much noise.

MINOR: You often deal with calamities and atrocities, but there always seems to be an almost corresponding awareness of wonder in the things you write. Are you conscious of that?

WESCHLER: I’m not unaware of it, and occasionally I am intent on it. I would say that I experience things at the two poles. Wonder and horror.

David Hockney [an artist about whom Weschler has written frequently] is an inspiration in this regard, having survived probably more than the rest of us—the AIDS crisis, and the whole devastation of his entire cohort of friends. That would have turned anyone else into a raving, howling shade of themselves, but Hockney refuses to let that happen. His response is to celebrate life all the more. I admire that choice. If you spend part of your time thinking about the horrors, as I think you must if you are a citizen, you can either go stark, raving crazy, or you can commit to the other side. So they are of a piece to me, wonder and horror, and I don’t think I’m all that unusual in that regard. Perhaps as a writer you have to express it more.

MINOR: You tell a story in Vermeer in Bosnia about the Italian jurist Antonio Cassese, who was presiding over the preliminary hearings of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. He spent his days hearing about the cruelest rapes and murders and tortures humans can devise to inflict upon each other, and you asked him, “how, regularly obliged to gaze into such an appalling abyss, he had kept from going mad himself?” His response was that he kept sane by going to the Mauritshuis museum and looking at Vermeer paintings.

WESCHLER: He said that, and I had been doing it also, and I don’t think either one of us was aware that the other had been doing it. It’s not that surprising when you consider that Mauritshuis housed The Anatomy Lesson right next door to the room containing the Vermeers. It’s a pretty amazing museum.

The trail of epiphanies there, the chain of pearls, was his saying that all of Europe was Bosnia when Vermeer was doing his paintings, and in fact, that’s what those paintings were about. The way that Vermeer was inventing his pieces was the very invention of subjectivity.

That’s pretty much how it happened. I won’t pretend that it happens that way with all my writing. I pride myself on sometimes giving a fictive account of how things happen in terms of ordering matters so they can be more clearly understood. Not (a fictive account) in the actual reporting, but in the reporting of how the insight is happening.

MINOR: An earlier book, Calamities of Exile, collects three nonfiction novellas, and that tripartite pattern repeats itself through much of your work. In Vermeer in Bosnia, for example, the reader is offered “A Balkan Triptych”, “Three Polish Survivor Stories”, “Three L.A. Pieces”, and “Three Portraits of Artists”. What do you mean to do when organizing your work in this way?

WESCHLER: Triptychs work very nicely. A single piece by itself is whatever it is. Two pieces side by side set up artificial priorities. With a triptych you get all kinds of nice resonances. Flaubert says if you’re a fiction writer, if you’re setting a new scene, you need to mention three objects in the room, and that will pop the scene into three-dimensional reality.

I’ve just been reading this incredible essay by Walter Murch, the film editor, at transom.org, where he talks about a principle he calls Two-and-a-Half. If you have one conversation, people can hear it. If you have two overlapping conversations, people can keep track of both. You could even have a half of another conversation, perhaps a mild, uninteresting conversation, and people can hear that. If you add another conversation, people can’t hear it; it becomes noise.

MINOR: You’ve started a new literary journal.

WESCHLER: Omnivore. It’s hopeless.

MINOR: I haven’t been able to find the prototype issue anywhere.

WESCHLER: There’s one place you can buy it. The bookstore at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

One of the reasons I quit The New Yorker and took this job at the NYU Institute was to put up or shut up. I keep complaining about the fate of magazines, and I wanted to take a chance and show what I mean.

MINOR: Is the magazine going to happen in any regular way?

WESCHLER: On any given day, it looks like it might, but then it doesn’t, and it’s very frustrating. There is not a patronage system in America for general interest magazines like there is for ballet, for opera.

There was a moment when Newhouse was taking over The New Yorker, and a bunch of us went up to William Shawn, the editor—Alistair Reed was in the lead—and we said, “Why don’t we all just leave and start our own magazine?” And Mr. Shawn said, “Mr. Reed, you don’t understand. Writers don’t found magazines. Millionaires found magazines.”

MINOR: What is it that you would hope to do with such a magazine?

WESCHLER: It seems to me that the great crisis in this country is a media environment which is attention-squeezed, hate-driven, ink-blotted, sound-bit. Basically neo-Pavlovian, treating you like a salivating dog. Stimulate, jolt, salivate. You find that you are treated as a consumer, not as a citizen, not as someone capable of absorption and marvel and wonder.

I write books, but what really turns me on, what really captivates my thinking, is magazine culture. That’s a difficult thing, because magazine culture is in big trouble. If I write a book, it gets read by ten thousand people, if I write a magazine article it gets exposed to a hundred thousand people who are reading about something they didn’t know they had any interest in. The kind of writing I love comes at things from the side, and it relishes narrative itself. You find yourself reading, and about halfway along, you realize that what you’re reading is the most important thing in the world.

**

Purchase books by Lawrence Weschler from Powell’s.

See Also: The Best of Not 2008

This is a Rumpus Reprint and was originally published in The Journal at Ohio State University

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Lawrence Wechsler by David Hockney

“I generally don’t use tape recorders. I take notes and work from memory. You can use the tape recorder as an aide-memoire, but I can tell you that I have been doing this for thirty years, and I’ve never had anyone challenge a quote. And I never quote what people have actually said. I quote what people remember having said. I try to create a fair rendition of the point they were making in the spirit in which it was recounted.”

Lawrence Weschler is widely regarded, alongside John McPhee, Calvin Trillin, and William Langewiesche, as one of our foremost practitioners of literary nonfiction. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker for twenty years, retiring in 2001 to direct the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. His books include Vermeer in Bosnia, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Boggs: A Biography, Calamities of Exile, and, most recently, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.

MINOR: Do you mind if I record you?

WESCHLER: Sure, but I don’t like using a tape recorder. A straight transcript of a conversation invariably falsifies what happens in two ways. First, every reporter knows that all the good stuff happens after you turn off the tape recorder, so there is obviously something that happens when the tape is running that does not when it’s off. But beyond that, the transcript only records the words. There is a whole subset of communication—gestures, the language of the body, facial expressions—taking place that is not words, and when you take that away, you have in fact falsified what has taken place. You might have had a very interesting, articulate conversation with someone, but when you read the transcript, what you find is not at all articulate.

MINOR: So how does one record information?

WESCHLER: I generally don’t use tape recorders. I take notes and work from memory. You can use the tape recorder as an aide-memoire, but I can tell you that I have been doing this for thirty years, and I’ve never had anyone challenge a quote. And I never quote what people have actually said. I quote what people remember having said. I try to create a fair rendition of the point they were making in the spirit in which it was recounted.

MINOR: The bigger issue, I suppose, is how one convinces other people to reveal information about themselves.

WESCHLER: Way back in college I had a marine biology teacher who learned I was just floundering on this big, amorphous topic, and I told him I was struggling, that I didn’t know what I was doing. And he said, “When you’re doing a big essay, it’s like you’re walking on the beach and you come upon a dead sea walrus and you’re curious about how he died. You can do one of two things. You can pick up that piece of driftwood over there and start bashing the flank. And all you are going to do is make blubber and hash of him. Or you can pick up that driftwood, go sit down on a boulder, pick up a rock and start sharpening the driftwood. It will take all afternoon, but by the end you’ll have a blade. Then you can do the autopsy, and in five minutes you’ll know what happened.” So when you’re dealing with a huge, amorphous subject, it’s best not to ask huge, amorphous questions. Better to spend ninety percent of your time honing the questions, and after awhile the subject will open up.

MINOR: In Vermeer in Bosnia, you write, “It’s one of the great things about great works of art that they can bear—and, indeed, that they invite—a superplenitude of possible readings, some of them contradictory.” Could the same be said of your own work, or of the literature of nonfiction in general?

WESCHLER: I want to get rid of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The class I teach at NYU is called “The Fiction of Nonfiction”, and it is less a class about reporting methods than it is about the fictional methods that can be applied to nonfictional writing. It presupposes that the writer will try to be fair, but also acknowledges that there is no such thing as objectivity, and revels in that fact. Then we get down to business and talk about all the stuff that’s interesting: form, freedom, irony, voice, tone, structure. We are looking at masters—Ian Frazier, Jane Kramer, John McPhee, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell—and if you look at their books, absolutely they are works of literature. What drives me crazy is that my books are spread all over the bookstore. My Boggs is in Economics, my A Miracle, A Universe is in Latin America. This book here (holds up a copy of Vermeer in Bosnia), who the hell knows where they’re gonna put this. I was in a Barnes & Noble somewhere and looked for Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders and found it in New Age Psychedelics. And it’s not just me; the same is true of Ian Frazier and Jane Kramer and so forth. The point is that they should be in alphabetical order, in Literature. It’s not just that my books have a superplenitude of meanings, but that they are designed to illuminate each other. Boggs and Mr. Wilson, for example, even have the same type face, the same trim size. They’re meant to be read side-by-side, but no one ever knows that.

MINOR: What kinds of things do your books say about each other?

WESCHLER: I’m interested in people or places that were moseying along in the everydayness of their lives, and they suddenly caught fire, and their lives became different than they thought they would be. That’s not only interesting on an artistic level, but also on a political level. When it happens in individual lives—Dave Wilson, Harold Shapinski—it’s almost comical. When it happens to a whole country, when a whole polity catches fire, it’s enthralling. When it happened in Poland, people said that Solidarity was the embodiment of the subjectivity of the Polish people. People who throughout history had been content to be treated as objects suddenly demanded to be treated as subjects. Repression consists of taking people who had been treated like subjects and turning them into objects, and the resistance was that refusal to be turned back into objects. So what is pervasive across my body of work is an interest in objects becoming subjects and what is involved in asserting that, or in the case of Vermeer, inventing that, dealing with all the forces that mitigate against that intention. And what becomes interesting, then, is an awareness of the workings of grace. You work and you work and you work, and then it is as though whatever happens, it happens by itself. It never would have happened without all that prior work, that preparation, but that prior work did not make it happen.

MINOR: What are some examples of these workings of grace?

WESCHLER: Solidarity is a good example. All the activists who spent the years of the Seventies in jail—all those years preparing for Solidarity—when August 1980 happened, it blew their minds. They had no idea why it happened. They acknowledged that it would not have happened without the prior work, but that the prior work did not make it happen. It was that plus something else. On the artistic level—you know this from your own writing—you work at something and it’s not working, it’s not working, it’s not working—and then suddenly it works. You’re in the zone. And that’s all very mysterious and very interesting to me. There’s something important going on there, and it’s unclear exactly what it is. The word grace comes from gratis: for free.

I’m very interested in Socratic artists, people who make you say, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? How is it that we are able to fly at all?” I love artists who can throw you into that state of perplex. In the case of the Mr. Wilson book, I endeavored to replicate the experience of going to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, where you’re reading the captions (beneath exhibits), where after awhile you ask yourself, “What the hell is going on here?” There’s that sense of slippage across media that’s very interesting to me.

MINOR: Vermeer in Bosnia ends with a short piece—something you call a convergence—in which you put a poem (Wislawa Szymborska’s “Maybe All This”) into conversation with a painting (Vermeer’s Lacemaker), and this ending also seems like a beginning, as you have published many more convergences since the book was released. Is the convergence a new literary form, and if so, what does it offer the reader and the writer?

WESCHLER: I offered that piece to a lot of places—The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s—and no one wanted it. But I’ve come to see it as sort of a natural form, something haiku-like, and I would love to see other people try it. It’s not a form original to me. When I published the first one, I was sure to give credit where credit is due, to John Berger. After Che Guevara was killed, Berger wrote an essay that began with that famous photograph of the general. He said that we all know where this photograph came from. It’s based on Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, a painting which is hotwired into everyone’s brain. That painting taught the general where to stand, the photographer what angle to take the picture from. The subtext—Che as Christ, as resurrection; the corpse of the thief in Rembrandt alludes to the corpse of Christ—taught me something. That was a huge, formative event for me. I think that’s how we tend to think anyway, but our thoughts are muffled by so much noise.

MINOR: You often deal with calamities and atrocities, but there always seems to be an almost corresponding awareness of wonder in the things you write. Are you conscious of that?

WESCHLER: I’m not unaware of it, and occasionally I am intent on it. I would say that I experience things at the two poles. Wonder and horror.

David Hockney [an artist about whom Weschler has written frequently] is an inspiration in this regard, having survived probably more than the rest of us—the AIDS crisis, and the whole devastation of his entire cohort of friends. That would have turned anyone else into a raving, howling shade of themselves, but Hockney refuses to let that happen. His response is to celebrate life all the more. I admire that choice. If you spend part of your time thinking about the horrors, as I think you must if you are a citizen, you can either go stark, raving crazy, or you can commit to the other side. So they are of a piece to me, wonder and horror, and I don’t think I’m all that unusual in that regard. Perhaps as a writer you have to express it more.

MINOR: You tell a story in Vermeer in Bosnia about the Italian jurist Antonio Cassese, who was presiding over the preliminary hearings of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. He spent his days hearing about the cruelest rapes and murders and tortures humans can devise to inflict upon each other, and you asked him, “how, regularly obliged to gaze into such an appalling abyss, he had kept from going mad himself?” His response was that he kept sane by going to the Mauritshuis museum and looking at Vermeer paintings.

WESCHLER: He said that, and I had been doing it also, and I don’t think either one of us was aware that the other had been doing it. It’s not that surprising when you consider that Mauritshuis housed The Anatomy Lesson right next door to the room containing the Vermeers. It’s a pretty amazing museum.

The trail of epiphanies there, the chain of pearls, was his saying that all of Europe was Bosnia when Vermeer was doing his paintings, and in fact, that’s what those paintings were about. The way that Vermeer was inventing his pieces was the very invention of subjectivity.

That’s pretty much how it happened. I won’t pretend that it happens that way with all my writing. I pride myself on sometimes giving a fictive account of how things happen in terms of ordering matters so they can be more clearly understood. Not (a fictive account) in the actual reporting, but in the reporting of how the insight is happening.

MINOR: An earlier book, Calamities of Exile, collects three nonfiction novellas, and that tripartite pattern repeats itself through much of your work. In Vermeer in Bosnia, for example, the reader is offered “A Balkan Triptych”, “Three Polish Survivor Stories”, “Three L.A. Pieces”, and “Three Portraits of Artists”. What do you mean to do when organizing your work in this way?

WESCHLER: Triptychs work very nicely. A single piece by itself is whatever it is. Two pieces side by side set up artificial priorities. With a triptych you get all kinds of nice resonances. Flaubert says if you’re a fiction writer, if you’re setting a new scene, you need to mention three objects in the room, and that will pop the scene into three-dimensional reality.

I’ve just been reading this incredible essay by Walter Murch, the film editor, at transom.org, where he talks about a principle he calls Two-and-a-Half. If you have one conversation, people can hear it. If you have two overlapping conversations, people can keep track of both. You could even have a half of another conversation, perhaps a mild, uninteresting conversation, and people can hear that. If you add another conversation, people can’t hear it; it becomes noise.

MINOR: You’ve started a new literary journal.

WESCHLER: Omnivore. It’s hopeless.

MINOR: I haven’t been able to find the prototype issue anywhere.

WESCHLER: There’s one place you can buy it. The bookstore at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

One of the reasons I quit The New Yorker and took this job at the NYU Institute was to put up or shut up. I keep complaining about the fate of magazines, and I wanted to take a chance and show what I mean.

MINOR: Is the magazine going to happen in any regular way?

WESCHLER: On any given day, it looks like it might, but then it doesn’t, and it’s very frustrating. There is not a patronage system in America for general interest magazines like there is for ballet, for opera.

There was a moment when Newhouse was taking over The New Yorker, and a bunch of us went up to William Shawn, the editor—Alistair Reed was in the lead—and we said, “Why don’t we all just leave and start our own magazine?” And Mr. Shawn said, “Mr. Reed, you don’t understand. Writers don’t found magazines. Millionaires found magazines.”

MINOR: What is it that you would hope to do with such a magazine?

WESCHLER: It seems to me that the great crisis in this country is a media environment which is attention-squeezed, hate-driven, ink-blotted, sound-bit. Basically neo-Pavlovian, treating you like a salivating dog. Stimulate, jolt, salivate. You find that you are treated as a consumer, not as a citizen, not as someone capable of absorption and marvel and wonder.

I write books, but what really turns me on, what really captivates my thinking, is magazine culture. That’s a difficult thing, because magazine culture is in big trouble. If I write a book, it gets read by ten thousand people, if I write a magazine article it gets exposed to a hundred thousand people who are reading about something they didn’t know they had any interest in. The kind of writing I love comes at things from the side, and it relishes narrative itself. You find yourself reading, and about halfway along, you realize that what you’re reading is the most important thing in the world.

**

See Also: The Best of Not 2008

This interview was originally published in The Journal at Ohio State University

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