Her new collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, embraces speculative fiction wholeheartedly (and cocoons, too, for that matter). From the titular immortal citrus-suckers to a portentous flock of seagulls to the unnerving appearance of what Russell calls an “urban scarecrow,” the surreal phenomena in these stories break your heart but leave your suspension of disbelief completely intact.

Russell was superlatively friendly and easy with a laugh as we talked over the phone about humor, sentence-level craftwork, and, of course, U.S. presidents reincarnated as horses.

***

The Rumpus: After writing such a brilliant and well-received novel, you returned to short fiction. What was that like? Is there sort of an itch short fiction scratches that long fiction doesn’t and vice versa?

Karen Russell: I think there is an itch that’s only scratchable with a story—although that sounds like something from a medical textbook and I’m just speaking in some weird euphemism. I definitely think that there’s a pleasure really specific to the short story form. For readers too, for reading and writing. It’s funny because I didn’t actually think that I liked short stories until I got to college, basically in the way you preemptively decide you don’t like something because you’ve never tried it. The first collections that I read were, I think, Flannery O’Connor and Junot Díaz and George Saunders.

Just something about the range that’s possible in a story collection. I think they’re sort of narrow and deep in this way. You can really come at some of the same themes and preoccupations from different angles, sort of like turning the facets of a little jewel. And then you can also hop bodies and continents, so there’s sort of this pinwheeling freedom, but there’s also this way you can maybe achieve a composite portrait of something that’s different than what you can do with a novel. You can occupy these really different points of view from story to story.

I missed it! I loved writing that novel, too, I really loved it, but I spent maybe half a decade of my life inside of it, so…whatever that energy is when the Incredible Hulk just sheds all his workaday clothes. I think I had some kind of sidesplitting need to just try on different skins again and move around a little.

Rumpus: And you’re working on another novel now, right?

Russell: Yes. I am. Very slowly.

Rumpus: Your voice just dropped like an octave.

Russell: I know! I became a baritone man! It’s a tricky thing at this particular moment because I’ve been talking about the story collection so much, and now I have some kind of false and disgusting wistfulness because that book is done. I’m so happy to celebrate something that is finished, that made it out of my brain and has an ISBN number. I sort of forgot about the chronic panic that comes with working with something where you just pray to god that it develops into, you know, a book that others can live in. There’s no guarantee of that. The funny thing about a story versus a novel is that with a story, I have so many stillborn story drafts or ideas that never really developed. They’re just in carnival jars of formaldehyde somewhere. That loss is acute, but I don’t think it’s as acute as throwing out a hundred pages of a novel, or the possibility that the novel’s not going to pan out at all. It’s just a different investment of your resources. I sort of think there’s a way I can take more risks in a short story sometimes, just setting up wilder premises, because if it doesn’t work out, it’s not like you forfeited two years of your life.

Rumpus: You’ve talked a lot in interviews about how you’re drawn to adolescent characters, and most of the characters in this book are around adolescence. But I was interested to see that there are not a lot of relationships with siblings portrayed, which is something that is sort of expected of adolescence—with the exception of Nal and Samson, who don’t have the greatest relationship. Instead, you kind of have these stand-ins for sibling relationships, like the soldiers in the tattoo story, the teenage clique in the Eric Mutis story, or the sports fans in the tailgating story. Is that something that was in your head, or did it just sort of happen that way?

Russell: That’s really interesting. I think in both Swamplandia! and my first short-story collection, sibling relationships tended to be at the heart of many of those stories. I’m really close to my own siblings, so I think that’s sort of just my template for the really elastic, really resilient love that you can have with siblings. There’s also this sense of twin selves or alternate reality versions of oneself.

I know that I very consciously didn’t want to keep repeating. I was interested in having different kinds of relationships at the fore in these stories. I thought the biggest stretch for me in some ways was “The New Veterans,” that relationship between this older woman and this young sergeant. But I do think that’s true. I wonder if that’s just generally the case, that you can look back at the family and read that template and see the way the characters are always recreating that dynamic. So soldiers as brothers, or definitely I think there’s a sisterhood in that textile mill in the “Reeling for the Empire” story. I’ll have to think about that some more. I’m not sure that was anything I was consciously aware of doing, to have kind of substitution relationships.

Rumpus: I feel like it’s really difficult to eliminate all autobiography from fiction, and I was wondering if that’s true for you, and if so, how does that work inside speculative fiction?

Russell: I think that’s a really smart question. I don’t think it’s possible to eliminate autobiography. On one level, I’m always sort of suspicious when I hear writers say, “Oh, there’s not a shred of autobiography in there,” because I’m never sure…do they just find a moon rock and make their story out of that? I think you’re always drawing on your lived experience and your emotions to imagine. You’re always imagining out of your own lived experience—what other set of references do you have?

I don’t think I’ve ever used material from my own life that directly, because I need to find a way to recast it. I think so much of the pleasure for me is creating a whole world or getting out of my small self and moving into a new territory or trying out a new voice. Only then do I feel capable of writing anything that feels remotely emotionally true. If I was writing as myself in Philadelphia, it would be the most boring story in the world—and probably false. I think I would be too self-conscious and hyperaware to really say something that felt true or meaningful.

I think a good example of doing sort of a body hop is [writing about] not just presidents, but presidents as reincarnated in the bodies of horses [in “The Barn at the End of our Term”]. That doesn’t feel like memoir—hopefully—but I think there is some emotional autobiography in that story to the extent that it’s about bafflement and these larger metaphysical questions and the idea of letting go of a pet delusion, letting go of a beautiful fantasy and confronting loss in a really painfully direct way. Which is what the horse has to do with the sheep, which sounds kind of ridiculous out loud, but I think it wouldn’t have pulled my interest or mattered to me if I hadn’t found some way to use that. There’s always going to be some emotional autobiography in there, and for me it’s a question of transposition or maybe an octave shift.

You just have a different metaphoric alphabet if you have access to both fantastic and “realistic” registers.

Rumpus: It’s funny that you mentioned the sheep, because that was actually my next question. Your stories have an amazing sense of humor, but the humor always seems to be paired with something tragic or terrifying, and the blind sheep, to me, was the ultimate example of that in this book.

Russell: I’m glad that that was terrifying—thank you! I also think that’s really deeply awful! In the beginning, when I set out to write a story, I almost always thought it was going to be just a straight comedy. I just thought it would be something absurd and really funny. In life, I’m always telling bad jokes, too, and I just didn’t see myself as a writer of tragedy. If the story worked at all, it was only because I had invented some comic premise and then something shifted, or there was some way my subconscious sneaked a weightier story into the package that I had created.

I really have no idea when that sheep trotted into the story. I can’t remember now, but I guess I must have had some sort of intuition that of course everybody’s fantasy of the afterlife is that they’ll be reunited with their loved ones. In this world or in any other, that just seems like one of the most painful illusions to be divested of. I guess what’s comic about that image is the same thing that makes it so tragic. It’s like coming at that idea from different angles or with different intonations. So it’s really funny that this powerful man has been reborn as a horse and is trying to seduce a sheep into admitting she’s his wife in heaven, but the degree to which that reality is so, so far from any kind of heaven anyone would want to occupy, and the frantic way that we’ll still chase our original theory, the amount of evidence that we can be confronted with before we’ll let go of that theory—I think that’s what’s comic and tragic about it.

Rumpus: It almost seemed to me like the humor arose naturally from the scary or sad parts. I mean, what is humor but a coping mechanism for difficult things in your life?

Russell: Right, right. Or a way to acknowledge something through laughter that would be almost unbearable to admit to your conscious awareness. Also, I should just say that I don’t think that story works for everybody. I find in stories and in life that my own sense of humor, my siblings say, “You’re going for a 30:70 ratio, you just throw stuff out there.” Maybe thirty percent of it will land. But with people that I really love like Calvino or Kafka, who are getting at these really universal absurdities and limitations and just how blinkered our vision is, laughing is a way you can acknowledge that as a community. I sort of love that. If everybody is laughing at something, you know that you’re all engaging with some kind of fundamental absurdity or injustice together in a way that is rarely ever possible in speech or polite conversation. Sometimes I think it can be an oblique way to get at some pretty monstrous truths.

Rumpus: I know it’s kind of boring to ask about your influences, but you mentioned Flannery O’Connor at the beginning of the interview, and I saw her all over this book. Is that fair?

Russell: Yay! I’m always afraid that if I claim her as an influence, she’ll come back and kick my ass. She’s such a powerful, ferocious woman. I think I would have to apply to Flannery in her own afterlife for permission to claim her as an influence. I feel the same way about a lot of these women like Carson McCullers or Katherine Dunn, who wrote Geek Love. They’re just ferociously intelligent, powerful writers, and that makes me shy about saying, “Oh, for sure!” It’s like claiming Shakespeare or the Bible as your influence or something. But I do really love her stories, and I think there’s something about her vision of the world that I felt a great kinship with the first time I read her. She’s such a weirdo, too!

Rumpus: I feel like you both have a lot of images that are really symbolic, but the reader doesn’t even recognize them as symbols because they’re so multivalent and come so naturally from the story. You just absorb them and understand them.

Russell: I’m glad to hear that. Basically, my teaching involves just quoting Flannery O’Connor to students, and George Saunders. Just badly paraphrasing them. She has a wonderful essay where she talks about how if you want to say the wooden leg is a wooden leg in “Good Country People.”…She’s talking about her own drafting process, and I think somebody is asking her about how she inserts symbols into her stories, and she says, “If you want to call the wooden leg a symbol, it is that, but it was a wooden leg first.” It had a literal, concrete importance to the story. It arose naturally from the landscape of the story, and there’s nothing “inserted.” It feels absolutely essential to the story’s plot, and then it accretes meaning as the story rolls forward.

I’ve never had much success if I decide early on, “Oh, I think I’ve found my scarlet letter!” Usually the story will present something that then, on its own, develops a deeper meaning or keeps getting complicated.

Rumpus: I’ve seen you say in interviews that you take a lot of joy in writing at the sentence level, and I think that comes across very clearly to the reader. What, in your opinion, makes a good sentence? What sort of sentences do you aspire to write, and how do you know when you’ve succeeded?

Russell: Some parts of [writing] really are so mysterious, like the forensics of how a story came to be. It’s just such a funny labor. I feel like I understand sentences sometimes in a way that’s more intuitive. I’m finicky about them.

This was a while ago—I wrote about bullfighters for GQ, and I was trying to get these ancient Spanish bull breeders to explain to me how you knew what a noble bull was. They all kept saying, “The noble bull, the Iberian bull,” and they would give me these tautological answers. They would pause for a moment and then be like, “Well, the noble bull is the bull that does noble things.” “It’s the one that looks noble.” Which was not helpful, it turns out, when I was trying to tell what made a really excellent bull from just a mediocre bull! But that’s me: “You know a good sentence when you see one. You know it when you hear it.”

Some of the most excellent sentence writers I know are Denis Johnson, Flannery O’Connor certainly, Ben Marcus, Sam Lipsyte, Toni Morrison…I think if you want to memorize a sentence, that’s a good sign. If there’s some way that sound and meaning are working in harmony. For me, a lot of it is the music of the sentence, that there’s some musicality and that there’s a logic that comes out of the sound, that grows out of the way the sentence is tuned up. “A good sentence is hard to find!”

Rumpus: Yes, perfect! Is there a way that writing sentences lets you into structuring or building character or things like that?

Russell: That’s a fantastic question. This is cool, because I very rarely get to talk about sentences, and it’s funny because that’s the building block of the whole cathedral. It’s a hard thing to teach. I often get frustrated when I’m teaching, because the workshop is really well-suited, often, to talking about character and the arc of the thing and the overall shapeliness of a story or novel. Sort of thematic questions. But sometimes it’s hard to really get at sentence-level stuff and what a difference it can make if you ditch a clause that’s dragging your balloon earthward, or what a difference it can make if you use “scarlet” instead of “red.”

I know there are some writers who can forge ahead and write something, kind of sketch it out and go back and fill in and embroider. But I’m a slave to this demonic process where I don’t even know what I’m writing about. I don’t even know why it matters to me or where I’m headed. It would be like if you could fly in a plane over a vast territory and take in the panorama, versus [being] on your belly looking at grass blades, just shimmying forward. Obviously, the smart way is to get an aerial view and then descend to the jungle, but I’m always on my belly, feeling my way. Maybe that’ll change, but that’s how it’s been so far.

Doesn’t it feel like somehow there’s a way that sound is not just window dressing, like you’re creating this logic as you go? Virginia Woolf is so great. I used to bring a paragraph from The Waves because you can hear her writing through this rhythm, a galloping rhythm, and you see her sort of digging through the turf. It’s like these claws of images coming at you. It’s really beautiful, and she’s sort of inventing a syntax that can contain these really seemingly disparate images together. She’s, by force of her syntax, yoking really dissimilar images together and making this implicit argument just by the way she’s ordering color and language. It’s beautiful. I think sometimes she’s going at such a breakneck speed it’s really thrilling. It’s like feeling someone making meaning out of the ether.

And it’s so particular! I have friends that just love a really clean, spare sentence and staccato rhythms. It’s funny how revealing it can be about a person, what they prefer stylistically. I do really think that it’s false to talk about style as if it was something independent from the substance of what you’re writing.

Rumpus: Do you get a bunch of hyperventilating fans at readings? Do people stop you on the street? Because when I mentioned I was interviewing Karen Russell—which I was extremely excited to do—all my friends were gasping and fainting.

Russell: I don’t believe you, you kind liar! Maybe your friends all have asthma, did you think about that? Maybe they’re all asthmatics and really needed their inhalers, and it was just weird timing! That’s so kind, and crazy. What feels sort of miraculous to me is going to readings and people will bring the story collection I wrote six years ago or something. There are some charitable people out there who have now read these three books that I wrote, and that’s amazing. I’m really grateful for that. They come out of the woodwork and show up at readings. I wish I had little Subway sandwich cards you could punch, you know? It’s like five, six, seven sandwiches, get a free one. I just want to give these people something, because they’ve really stuck it out with me for a lot of weird loop-de-loops. If I manage to ever write this second novel, I’m going to put a little punch card in there.

Rumpus: What was it like when the Pulitzer that clearly should have gone to you went to nobody?

Russell: I don’t have a great answer for that yet, isn’t that sad? That’s a question where you know it’s going to be on the test, so why not just figure out what your answer is? It’s open-book, and I still keep fudging it. I basically feel really grateful to the three nominating jurors. I think that that is a vote of confidence beyond what I ever would have expected was possible, to be on that shortlist. The shock and joy of that has really carried me through any of the more negative, controversial stuff. I don’t have any better answer than that, than just that it really was unbelievable to me that Michael Cunningham and Maureen Corrigan and Susan Larson, who were the nominating jurors, would put me up for that honor. I just hope that I can make good on that vote of confidence. I hope I can continue to grow and improve. I think I have sort of a Little League attitude toward it, where I feel like they put me in the game, so I want to do them proud now.

***

Photograph of Karen Russell © 2013 by Michael Lionstar.

Related Posts:

• Karen Russell Interview
• Litquake Interviews Karen Russell
• Karen Russell Shortlisted for an IMPAC
• A chat with Karen Russell
• The Rumpus Interview with Constance Hale

Like her previous books Sin and Syntax and Wired Style, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch is about grammar and language, but this one focuses on verbs—where they come from, how to use them, and why they’re important. Every chapter has a section for each of the titular action words: vex (which tackles vexing or confusing aspects of language); hex (which casts a curse on rules no one should actually follow); smash (which seeks to pulverize lazy writing and nasty habits); and smooch (which features verb usage so exemplary, you’ll want to kiss it on the mouth). Along with instruction and explanation, Hale braids in charming anecdotes, bits of linguistic history, and personal stories about growing up speaking both English and Hawaiian Pidgin.

The book is intended not only for writers who want to hone their craft, but also for anyone interested in the power and sparkle of language. Every reader will learn something; I love grammar and have spent a lot of time copyediting, both professionally and nonprofessionally, but I certainly didn’t know what ergative verbs were. And if someone had tried to teach me, they probably would have been so boring about it that I wouldn’t have listened—not so with Hale.

We spoke over Skype about Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch and the importance of playful, precise language.

***

The Rumpus: The book includes some very exacting rules—the difference between “may” and “might,” for example—but you also take care to include examples where it’s okay not to be grammatically perfect, like pop songs or fiction that’s aiming for a more colloquial style. How do you walk the line between being correct and being pedantic?

Constance Hale: That’s a really good question. I think you went to the heart of the book, really. One of the things that motivated me in writing the book in a kind of secondary way was this age-old—or at least four-century-old—battle between prescriptivism and descriptivism. Because of Sin and Syntax and a lot of the work that I’ve done, I was aware of this tension between people who walk the hypercorrect grammatical line and people who swing a little bit. Then in the small pond of language mavens or language experts, there are descriptivists and prescriptivists, or grammarians and linguists.

And I have never felt happy in either camp. As a writer, I like to know what’s grammatically correct, because I’m interested in it, but I don’t really think grammatically correct prose is always the most interesting prose to read. So I’ve always been interested in the tension in language between what’s correct and what’s incorrect, what’s standard and what’s nonstandard, and the tension between grammarians and linguists.

The central question that interests me is “What makes for better writing?” All I care about is better writing. If you answer questions with that as your central interest, sometimes you lean toward stuff that’s grammatically correct, and sometimes you don’t. What I’m trying to do in my books is not sit there and be this sort of prissy grammar diva. I’m not interested in being the Miss Manners of grammar. What I’m trying to do is give my readers a handle on language so when that reader sits down to write, some choices are at the front of that person’s mind that may not have been there in the first place, because they know more and understand more about language.

Rumpus: That reminds me a little of your interview at Nieman Storyboard about the book. You said, “I don’t care about the rules and I don’t like loosey-goosey language. All I care about is what makes great writing. I’ve noticed that if you walk down the middle, you can get pies thrown at you from both sides.” What do you think it is about language that gets people so riled up and eager to throw pies in the first place?

Hale: Well, I’m not a psychologist, but first of all, it’s so central to our humanity. What makes us different from everything else on the planet? We have language. We have the capacity to communicate and to touch each other intellectually or emotionally. It’s completely central to who we are, to our core being. And it matters a lot that we be able to communicate effectively. And yet, despite this, it isn’t taught very effectively in schools, and it isn’t taught very effectively, necessarily, within families. Your parents may make you feel kind of uptight about language if they correct you a certain way, or don’t correct you, or you might be ashamed of your parents. There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t taught very well.

That’s why I think it stirs up passions in two very different and kind of paradoxical ways. On the one hand, people love great language. We all love a great Bob Dylan song, and we all respond to a politician that’s able to speak really eloquently. We respond to good advertising. And all of us have our favorite writers, and part of the reason we love them is the way they use language. So there’s that positive passion.

And then there’s this negative passion, or anxiety, which is we don’t feel that we do it right and we haven’t been taught it in a particularly good way. As a culture, Americans don’t talk about language very much. We don’t talk about language at the dinner table. In some other cultures, they do. In some other cultures, they talk about language and grammar a lot more easily. It’s an interesting paradox to me, but it’s why I think people get so riled up about it.

Rumpus: What kind of responses have you gotten from people? I hope it’s not all pie-throwing!

Hale: No! The reviews of the book have been largely enthusiastic. Most of the responses that I get, whether it be to Sin and Syntax, or Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, or the language columns I did for The New York Times, are positive. I think people feel relieved to be able to talk about language, or they enjoy reading something about language. If I can figure out a way to write about grammar or syntax in such a way that it helps people, I think that’s welcome. By and large, the response is enthusiastic.

But there are people who have built their reputations and earned their money by being experts, and they don’t agree with all that I say. And I don’t agree with all that they say, and I challenge them. I definitely upset apple carts. That’s part of what I’m doing. It’s actually among the language experts that I think it’s a little more contentious.

Rumpus: Changing tack a little, in the book, you write, “When we choose our verbs, we need to internalize a cascading set of values. First, we want to be precise, to pinpoint our exact meaning.” Precision seems to be the most important thing to you, but there are limits to how precise English can be. I want to ask you how you try to overcome those limits, but basically this question is an excuse for me to ask you if you read the article in The New Yorker about that constructed language, Ithkuil.

Hale: People have told me about that New Yorker article, and I’m not ashamed to confess that I’m months behind, because I’m working on this book right now.

Rumpus: Well, the article is about this hyper-precise language that isn’t meant to be spoken in everyday situations. It’s invented as an ideal way to discuss politics or philosophy because it sort of forces you to say what you mean without ambiguity. In a normal language like English, how do you try to overcome natural limits where you can’t be that precise?

Hale: It’s such an interesting question. We can’t forget the value of associations and the value of music and the value of sound. While I’m kind of a precision Nazi, it’s not so much that I think our language has limitations. I mean, hardly—our language is so rich. My biggest complaint is that novice writers don’t take enough care with their words.

What I see over and over again, as an editor, is writers using vague and generic words, and I, as a reader, don’t get excited about what I’m reading. For me, part of the excitement of reading is that excitement of a recreated world. The reason I’m a precision Nazi—if I even am a precision Nazi—is so many people don’t take that level of care with their words. Once you reach that threshold, there are other things that are equally important, but your average writer doesn’t reach that threshold. Even some writers that are considered pretty good, I find them disappointing on the style level. It’s not at all that our language is too limited—it’s that most of us don’t use the language the way we might.

I can give you so many examples. I do seminars, and I have a couple of exercises that I do over and over again that are fascinating to me. If you have a roomful of people, and you ask everyone in the room, which I do—I say, “Look, I don’t know any of you. I would like each of you to take three nouns to introduce yourself to me. What three nouns can you use to give me the best picture that three nouns can give?” Invariably, a very large number pick writer, which is a really stupid noun in that context, because they’re writers—that’s why I’m talking to them! I know they’re writers! That’s not giving me any information. Literally, I just spoke at the California Writer’s Club. That is a useless noun. That is a wasted noun.

Now, if they said journalist, or if they said poet, or if they said copywriter—all of those are more specific. And that’s a roomful of writers! To me, it’s such an easy illustration of the problem. I’m not blaming anybody. It’s that we speak and we write kind of on autopilot sometimes, and the default is generic words. We just don’t push ourselves to be more specific. But I don’t think we need some fancy-schmancy other language. And I certainly think that people in political science and philosophy could calm down a little bit and use more common words, and we’d all be better for it.

Rumpus: How do you feel about the idea that the Internet or other aspects of modern technology are causing a sort of decline in literacy?

Hale: I don’t agree with that premise. I think that actually they’re leading to an increase in literacy. I don’t think it’s really about literacy. I think it’s about something else. A lot of people are writing and reading a lot more, but that doesn’t mean that the number of people writing in a really intentional and intelligent way has increased, nor has the number of people reading in a really intentional and intelligent way increased.

I think probably the numbers are the same as they were a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, a small group of people read a lot and wrote a lot and wrote quite well, and a huge number of people were illiterate. Now, probably about the same number of people write well and read well, and a lot of other people, instead of being illiterate, spend all their time texting and tweeting. It’s mistaking what’s happening at a mass level for what’s happening at the elite level.

Rumpus: Do you think that the elite level has then been affected in any way? Democratized? Is a different population making up the elite level now?

Hale: I don’t think so. There are just so many places where you can go to read mind-blowing stuff now, but you can also go to a lot of places and read not-mind-blowing stuff. There’s just a lot more people writing and publishing now, and there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s not that great, but that doesn’t mean that the great stuff isn’t great. I mean, The Rumpus is doing really wonderful stuff, and it’s partly because of new technology. Always there are going to be places where people with a more literary bent gather and share their work, and then there are going to be places where things are operating at a more mass level.

Maybe we could just take Huffington Post as an example, because Huffington Post is something that’s made possible because of technology. The articles and essays there are only as good as the individual who wrote each one, because generally, they’re not edited. There’s no barrier to entry, anybody can post, and it’s the great democratizer, right? There’s some really good stuff on Huffington Post, and there’s some really bad stuff on Huffington Post. I would venture to say that Huffington Post is as good as, or better than, your average newspaper fifty years ago. If you take an average small-town paper fifty years ago, Huffington Post is probably better.

This is why I don’t really buy this argument. I think this argument comes from people saying, “Oh, texting is so idiotic, and tweeting is so idiotic.” Well, go look at telegrams. They were kind of idiotic, too. And some of them were really good, because the person sending the telegram was taking time and care to be kind of witty. Some people take time and care in their tweets and their texts to be kind of witty. But it’s like a telegram: we can’t confuse those with literature.

Rumpus: What about the concept of a sort of “literacy privilege,” the idea that people who use nonstandard or incorrect grammar are disadvantaged or even oppressed? Like if you’re maybe dyslexic or speaking in AAVE [African American Vernacular English], it’ll be harder for you to get an education or a job or just be taken seriously when you are speaking.

Hale: Well, it’s a complicated question, and again, I’m not a social historian, and I’m not a social scientist, and I’m not a linguist, but I think that our attitude toward nonstandard English is outdated and small-minded, generally. As you can probably tell from Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, I really like nonstandard English. My particular odd upbringing, where I spoke both grammatically correct English when I was at home and nonstandard English or Hawaiian Creole when I was at school or playing with friends, has led me to believe that we all have the capacity to speak both. In my mind, what we all ought to be doing is kind of trying to be bilingual in English—trying to, when it’s appropriate, speak grammatically correct or elegant English. And we all ought to be able to play and have fun with language when that’s appropriate.

Like maybe when you’re talking to kids and reading kids’ books, you can drop all of that and speak in Dr. Seuss speak. Or if you grew up in the barrio or something like that, and you speak Spanglish, that’s fine. Where I think we should be putting our attention is having everybody be bi- or trilingual. That’s the ideal state. It may be that if you’re trilingual, in the old days you’d speak Latin and French and English, but maybe we should speak standard English and black English and geek-speak, you know?

The point is that we have the capacity as human beings to speak more than one language, so rather than stigmatizing one language and elevating another language, I think we should just see them as different, and colorful in different ways, and effective in different ways. I encourage everybody to have the facility to go back and forth between them. We need a good education system so that people can do both—or three or four. That’s the purpose of education. That’s what I’m trying to sort of subtly encourage in my books, but I think it’s wrongheaded to think that the path to glory is only through standard English.

I can point you to a lot of professors who are very well-educated and speak hypercorrect grammar, and they are boring as shit! No one reads their books, for good reason. If what we’re talking about is writing in a compelling way so that people read you, grammatical English is only going to get you so far.

Rumpus: People like George W. Bush got quite a bit of ink in the book, and I know we all love to make fun of him, but I really love his made-up word that you included: “scrutineering.” I was wondering if you had any favorite errors that people make that are actually kind of cool.

Hale: There aren’t so many that I like. There are definitely ones that irritate me. I hate “orientate.” And I thought you were going to mention “misunderestimate,” which is very funny, but it’s sad when the president of the country doesn’t understand that that’s not a word. For me, it’s terrific to have someone like Obama who speaks and writes well. It was really painful for me to have someone like Bush. It has nothing to do with partisanship, in my case.

I do love speakers who are great speakers, whether it be Warren Rudman on the Republican side, or George Mitchell on the Democratic side, or Obama. I love it when public figures are real masters of the language, and I find it regrettable when they’re not. It’s not really snobbery. If George Bush were using the word “scrutineering” knowledgeably, knowingly…

Rumpus: …in a way that made everyone get what he was talking about.

Hale: Groovy! Great! But it’s regrettable when public figures are just blowing it.

Rumpus: In the book, you mention “lunge,” “emerge,” and “cajole” as some favorite verbs of yours. What draws you to them, and do you have any other favorites, in English or in any other language?

Hale: It’s kind of funny about those three words, because obviously I’m very tuned into sound. There is this kind of J sound, which is sort of sexy to me. They’re all pretty simple words. They’re all one or two syllables, and that says something too about me. I like words that pack meaning and sound and surprise all in one syllable. Those words excite me.

I love the word “lurch.” I think most of us, we just say “walk,” or “stumble.” I like words that are a little bit surprising but they’re not so complicated that everybody doesn’t know what you’re saying. And the other thing is that they conjure an image. I love verbs that actually plant an image in the listener’s head or the reader’s head.

It’s not a verb, but there’s a word in Hawaiian that I very much am fascinated by, and it’s a simple word. It’s called “pono.” It’s actually in the Hawaii state motto, which is “Ua mau ke ea o ka aina I ka pono.” When I was growing up and that was the state motto, it was always translated as “righteousness”: “the life of the land will be perpetuated in righteousness.” And that seemed very biblical and Christian and kind of weird to me. But the more I came to know Hawaiian, the more I learned that that’s not really the right translation for “pono.”

Going back to your question about precision, I’m always intrigued when there’s a word in another language that can’t really be translated into English without a lot of explanation. It makes you wonder whether there’s something we’re not experiencing. In the case of that word in Hawaiian, it makes me think about moral correctness or righteousness. It’s interesting to me that we can’t translate that without these heavy Christian-laden words: “righteousness” and “morally correct.” Actually, it just means “do the right thing.” It means, like, in the situation that you’re in, you’re doing the right thing. Sometimes words in another language that you can’t translate call your attention to ideas that we maybe rank less important. And this idea that in Hawaii, there’s this conscientiousness about other people and about the environment and your place in the world, that you always ought to be doing the right thing by the people and things around you. We don’t have a word for that in English.

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Hutchins, who is a Truman Capote Fellow in Stanford’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and who has conducted a fair amount of Rumpus interviews himself, met with me to discuss the book.

*** 

The Rumpus: This is your first novel. What was it like making the transition from shorter fiction to a full-length novel?

Scott Hutchins: Well, this book grew out of some short fiction. I had written a couple of short stories—they weren’t related—that ended up feeding into the book in kind of an odd way. I wrote the book in kind of an odd way. I was working a lot, working lots of different jobs and patching together a living, and every day, I would just write two pages. No particular order, just scenes I assumed I would need at some point or was interested in exploring. So I didn’t really write it like a short story—sometimes you see books that feel like they’re a series of short stories. I didn’t even write it as a novel. I don’t know what I wrote it as. A prose poem or something. I had to go back and put it all together. Novel structure is something I’m fascinated by and love, so it’s something I had to think a lot about and I’d like to get better at. I find the transition to be good, I just find it to be different. I think short stories are just doing different things. The middle of a novel is unlike anything I’ve ever done in a short story. It’s just a different thing.

Rumpus: How did you get interested in the Turing test and the larger theme of seeming versus being?

Hutchins: You know, I was looking at some answers that I had given to someone earlier, and I had some great answers that I’d totally forgotten about, so I don’t know how trustworthy writers are when asked those questions. But I think that artificial intelligence and the Turing test, to me, are kind of philosophical questions, almost like practical philosophy. I came to them via questions of philosophy like seeming and being and consciousness and what are we, who are we. That was sort of the interest. I found these things in that direction. I read the Turing essay. It’s called “Computing Machinery and Machine Learning” or something like that. It has a very unassuming name, but it’s a totally devilish little piece of work. Apparently in the 1950s, it was a real concern whether computers were intelligent and maybe they were going to take over the world.

Rumpus: It’s still a concern!

Hutchins: Well, now it’s a little more believable. In the 1950s, what did they have? They didn’t even really have real computers. They just had machines. But [Turing] has to go through and defeat eight common objections to say that machines really could be intelligent at some point. I found that sort of fascinating—and of course, we’re machines.

Rumpus: In your acknowledgments, you mention that you were a judge for a Turing test contest. What was that like, and how did it inform the book?

Hutchins: The Turing test is really kind of a theoretical thing, but this guy Hugh Loebner, who’s a real character, has been hosting an actual Turing test for over twenty years now. He started out with big-time co-sponsorship—Daniel Dennett, a famous philosopher, and others were very interested in it—and he has, over the years, managed to alienate everyone he works with. He’s not even involved in computers. He has a family business, which is a brass works. They make finials. That’s what he does, he has a brass works. He’s very pro-prostitution and -drugs, and he hates work, and he thinks that these intelligent computers could maybe make it so that we’d never have to work again. That’s kind of his goal. He’s kind of a madman!

So he hosts this test, and sometimes it does well and it’s a big thing, and sometimes, like the year I hosted it, it was actually in his apartment. I went to New York, and it was hosted in his apartment. Some people had flown in; the winner had flown in from London. But most people were from the New York area. I guess one of the competitors was from Chicago.

Rumpus: No one from Silicon Valley?

Hutchins: Nope. No one from Silicon Valley. Isn’t that interesting? There was no one there from California. There were two judges from California—I was one of them. It was even less impressive than the Turing test in the book. We set up the tables, and we typed, and the computers responded, and you knew in seconds that they were computers. But it was kind of fun. One of the judges to my right, who was also from California—he was a computer science professor—had a relationship with one of the human [contestants], and he just hated this guy. He looked over at me one time and said, “I think I’m talking to two computers.”

Rumpus: Did you ever use any of those little chatbots on AIM? When I was in middle school, maybe, they used to have Smarterchild—they’re probably still around—and you would get on AOL Instant Messenger and you could chat with them. And you could tell in seconds, absolutely.

Hutchins: [When you said AIM], I was thinking of AIML, which is Artificial Intelligence Markup Language. A guy named Rick Wallace created this markup language, and he created this character called ALICE. You could get on and chat with ALICE in all of her different forms. That’s what I’ve done chatting with, and you know instantly. They come back with the same answer or…

Rumpus: “Do you think blah blah blah?”

Hutchins: Yeah, I love that one, that’s my favorite. And that’s probably the most successful one of every one, that just rephrases it as a question. Like a therapist.

Rumpus: Like ELIZA?

Hutchins: Like ELIZA, which is from the ’60s. That’s how old that one is.

Rumpus: So do you have any sort of tech background?

Hutchins: No.

Rumpus: Did you pick up anything by being in Silicon Valley or on the Stanford campus?

Hutchins: Yeah, I think so. More cultural than actual skill, the kind of futurism that’s around Silicon Valley. Stanford has a fair amount of that, but I think around Stanford, the futurism is wild. I met a couple at a party a couple years ago who were going to the Singularity University.

Rumpus: There’s a Singularity University?

Hutchins: Absolutely. It’s held down at the old NASA base in the South Bay. Ray Kurzweil has this Singularity University. [This couple] had drunk the Kool-Aid. Maybe they’re going to do great things, I don’t know. But there’s just that kind of stuff going on. Google considers itself an artificial intelligence project, essentially, and I mean, they just made a car that can drive itself, so it’s not like they’re not doing anything. They’re doing amazing things. You know what the environment is like down there. It’s very tech, very futuristic—or futurist, I should say.

Rumpus: Yeah, it rang very true to me. And actually, my next question is about how the book is extremely rooted in place, in San Francisco and, to a lesser extent, Silicon Valley. It was so accurate it was insane! There’s a scene on the street where my grandmother lives, and [in another scene] I was like, “Yes, that is the bakery I bought bread from.” What made it so important to you to make it so accurate, even beyond street names or locations, down to the brand of bread?

Hutchins: That’s a good question. I’m not sure if I have an answer. I remember specifically reading some stories by Ellen Gilchrist when I was in college. I went to college in northwest Arkansas, and the stories took place in that town. She messed with the geography a little bit in order to make the story work, and it drove me crazy. Maybe there’s something about that that’s given me a desire to have things match up as closely as they can without affecting the world. But I also think one of the things that interested me about writing this book and writing about this area is just getting all those details, just capturing the everyday, trying to take almost a snapshot of this world as it is now. Because it’s changed a lot, and I think in twenty years, it’ll change. Maybe the bakery will still be there, I don’t know!

Rumpus: Are you originally from Arkansas?

Hutchins: Mm-hmm. Born and raised.

Rumpus: There was a little bit of that in the book, sort of.

Hutchins: Sure, yeah. There’s a little bit. The house that Neill goes back to is not exactly the house that I lived in, but it’s on the property that I lived on, and there’s a lot of stuff around there that is from my childhood.

Rumpus: Why set it here instead of Arkansas? Or, I know you went to Michigan for your MFA—what’s so captivating about this place as opposed to anyplace else where you have direct experience (or not)?

Hutchins: Well, like Neill, California is the scene of my adult life, and that’s fascinated me. Also, I think the United States is the most abstract country. It’s very much a country of ideas and conceptions, a lot of them not fully thought out. And in California, that’s sort of turned up to eleven. It’s definitely rich material and a place that I’m fascinated with, and like talking about and like thinking about. What does it mean to be an adult in the ways that we’re slightly stunted adults in California at this time? Again, this moment in time in California is very interesting to me.

Rumpus: What was it like trying to find a voice for a computer program, but one that was based on a person’s diaries?

Hutchins: That was one of the most challenging parts, and that’s one of the reasons I judged the Turing test, just to go and see it was it was like to interact with these computers. I did quite a bit of chatting online, which you can. There’s some great chatting things. I think ALICE may be taken down, but I think you can still chat with Jabberwocky, which is one of the chatbots. It’s kind of illuminating. And obviously, Siri is an extension of this stuff, and she’s also hilariously bad in many ways, but very accurate in others. Just seeing what it’s like to have that non-conversation. What is it like to talk to an interlocutor that has no sense of context, who doesn’t know what you’re saying, who’s just looking at words and kind of throwing words back at you. That was just research, and then my job was to make it slowly evolve. You can read it metafictionally in some ways, in that it’s a little bit like a writer creating a character. There’s something a little bit like that.

Rumpus: Yeah, the protagonist is sort of making revisions. They’re very explicit, perhaps more explicit than a writer’s.

Hutchins: Normally. You don’t usually see the strikeouts.

Rumpus: Did you write a big corpus of diary entries beforehand or add them in as you went?

Hutchins: I added them in as I went. Actually, originally, the talking computer was not his father. That got changed after a conversation with Adam Johnson. We had gone up to a room in Stanford, and we storyboarded both of our novels. He did The Orphan Master’s Son, which was incredibly, complexly, and terrifically storyboarded already. I was like, “Oh, well, that looks great.” And then I did mine, and he said, “So, the computer is obviously his father.” I said, “No…? Yes!”

Rumpus: There’s a lot of panic in the media about technology alienating people or isolating people, but it’s rather the opposite in this book, where the computer program is a very important interlocutor—very important conversation happens there—while the anti-technology group comes off as creepy and off-putting. Do you have any thoughts about the role of technology in communication and relationships?

Hutchins: I think it’s a good question, and I don’t come down really on either side. Even though the group that you’re referring to in the book is somewhat satirized, or maybe largely satirized, it’s not that I can’t see many of the points that they make. But I think that these are just tools that we use. You know, I read a book about life in America from 1780 to 1820, which is just like normal life—it’s totally fascinating. People were really worried about what the quality of the new horse and buggies and the new roads were doing to family life. They felt like they were tearing the family apart at its roots. So we’ve been worrying about this kind of stuff for centuries, and I’m just choosing not to worry. And I think there are advantages, too. You take a Hipstamatic picture and e-mail it to your brother in Houston. There’s something very immediate about that, and it’s nice that you can keep in touch in these different ways. Obviously, I haven’t written or received a letter on paper that’s thoughtful in a long time, and I miss those. I do think that’s something we’ve lost: the long, thoughtful letter. But otherwise, I’m not deeply concerned.

Internet dating, for instance, is such the norm now that we’re going to have to come up with a retronym for other types of dating. I don’t know what you would call it. “Bodily dating,” or “face-to-face.” I’m not deeply worried, but I do think there is a kind of distractible thing happening with technology that I’m not sure what to do about. There’s also a kind of fantasy life that happens on the Internet with search and this endless…you can get a kind of overly consumerist attitude toward even your love life. You can start looking through the thousands of possible matches on your dating site, which is pretty similar to looking through something at Costco or going to Amazon. There’s kind of a similar mechanism to all those that maybe we should be concerned about, I don’t know.

Rumpus: Including those percentage matches on OKCupid.

Hutchins: Yeah, you’re like, “Do I want somebody I’m 60% matched to? I don’t know.” I had a good friend who was dating on OKCupid last year, and her way of interacting with guys she was looking at was she couldn’t stand any grammatical errors. If somebody had a grammatical error, and Lord forbid they e-mailed her with an e-mail with a grammatical error, she would e-mail the nastiest e-mails back to them. It was really funny. It’s an extension of us, so I think that’s the thing. You can’t worry too much about the technology, because it’s always just an extension of us.

Rumpus: Although, it’s interesting: the artificial intelligence program in the book is from a diary that isn’t meant for anybody else to see, so it elides that curation of self, or the way that you present yourself on OKCupid. It would have been very different if it had been his father’s blog.

Hutchins: Right. That’s something which is very interesting, the curation of self and how we’re kind of thinking about ourselves as…”products” is maybe putting it a little strongly, but we think of ourselves as a presentation. And obviously, Neill, Sr. wouldn’t have imagined any of that, and if he was alive, he wouldn’t have done it, either.

Rumpus: Going back to the satirized group, Pure Encounters—what was your research like for that? Hopefully you didn’t join a sex cult…

Hutchins: I did not! I considered it, but I thought that was going a little far. I did some reading. I read a little bit about ALF and ELF, the Animal Liberation Front and the Environmental Liberation Front, and some of the dispatches they were sending out, especially in the late ’90s. Just kind of what that tone is and that absolute certainty that 99.9% of the culture is engaged in some grand evil. I found that to be interesting, to take premises that are pretty agreeable-on and just go all the way. There’s something, to me, very West Coast about that. I understand a lot of members of ELF and ALF are also from the East Coast, but they were headquartered in Portland for the most part. There’s something very West Coast about that kind of activism/extremism.

But the sex cult stuff. There’s a lot of very earnest talk about what goes on in the bedroom in San Francisco that I’ve always found…it’s so serious and righteous, that I’ve always found it kind of comical. Obviously, a lot of people come here to be free sexually, and that’s great, and that’s important, and that’s something that needs to be talked about, but it sometimes lends this kind of righteous air to the conversations that I find funny.

Rumpus: I absolutely know what you’re talking about—or a super blasé attitude toward it, like it just comes up in conversation: “Oh yeah, I walked the dog, I got my dildo…”

Hutchins: Right. “I picked up the ball gag.” You’re like, “Oh, the ball gag! Great!”

Rumpus: So what is next? What are you working on now?

Hutchins: Well, it’s sort of this window between finishing a book and it coming out. I’m trying to start a new novel, so that’s what I’m working on right now.

Rumpus: Any ideas what it’s going to be about, or are you super early-on?

Hutchins: I’m super early-on, so I’m not sure very much right now. But I’ve been reading a lot of Dickens, so I’ve got large-book mechanism on the brain. Who knows? Tobias Wolff—his last novel that came out was maybe 200 pages long, and I think he said it was originally 800 pages, but he cut it down. And you can imagine: that’s 600 pages written by Tobias Wolff. I would just publish them as the outtakes. So who knows? I might be aiming to write something big and come up with a novella. But I’m just starting something very new right now. I’ve been looking a little bit at short stories and writing some occasional pieces, but it’s kind of nice to be in this play area again with a project. It’s nerve-wracking, but also kind of nice after having been really consumed by a project.

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