The Rumpus Interview With David Means

Means: All fiction is about the relation of the small moments in time to large ones.  Joyce explored that. Proust proved that. Faulkner proved it again and again. In a short story you’d better do something with time or it’ll feel short.  Alice Munro is a master of time; she’s brilliant at breaking the time barrier, and when she does it she makes a kind of literary sonic boom that shakes the foundations.  The leap in “The Gulch” moves the story from the poor boy on the cross to the detective where it lives on and on for the rest of his life. He’s the one who has to carry it forward.  I’m sorry to say, but it’s his to hold for the rest of time. He’s an old man fishing at the end, casting his line into the stream.

Rumpus: “A River in Egypt” is a tender, and unsparing view of fatherhood, of parental love and frailty. I love how much time is devoted to the nurse’s reaction to what she sees in the room. The way a facial expression says everything.

Means: If you’re a parent long enough you end up in that kind of situation–betraying yourself in the eyes of the world. Actually, it doesn’t take that long.  Betrayal in the eyes of the world starts the day you bring the baby home from the hospital.  You can’t live up to the ideal that’s expected of you. Certain things are out of your control.  The nurse’s face—from the view of the father holding his boy—kept speaking.  There’s no fear like the fear of a parent with a sick child.  You go into a state of high alert, a primitive—and I’m sure it’s evolutionary—highly charged survival mode.   A lot of fiction about being a parent seems to me to avoid the truth, which is that there are deep moments of Zen and silence, and intense isolation and loneliness in relation to the world, but there are also moments so sharp and fearful that they’re close to violent in nature.  You’d kill to protect.  You’d do anything for the flesh of the beloved if you could.  Carver wrote stories that touched on those feelings.  His characters, a lot of them mothers and fathers, are pushed and pulled by these fears all the time.  They drink around the fear.  They fight in the haze of parental anguish.

Rumpus: I liked the cinematic framing in “Oklahoma” the return to the thought of what would have happened in the movie of these character’s lives, and I liked the metaphor of life disappearing into the pinpoint of light on an old TV. Can you talk about this at all? The feelings of separation from ones own actions.

Means: I’m old enough to remember the way, when you shut the set off, a television image would zip into a little pinpoint of light that would stay on the screen for a second or two and then zip away.  As a kid, I got hope from seeing that happen and liked to pull the knob and push it in just to see it over and over again  I was glad the picture went somewhere and didn’t simply blank out.  At times, I wanted to go in there with it and zip away, but I couldn’t make that happen.  I can’t say much about that separation from ones actions in the story, except to say that writing for me is an act that goes in the opposite direction: an attempt to stare hard at a specific reality. I’m trying to stare at something while my characters are finding various ways to skirt it and avoid it.

Rumpus: In terms of how you work, how many drafts do you usually put your stories through? How planned out are they in advance, and what do you start with?

Means: I could never plan them out in advance beyond a small seed, maybe an image, or a character in a specific predicament.  I might have more of a story in mind, but I hold it for a long time before I write about it.  I’m still holding onto all of my family stuff.  When I’m ready, when I’m inspired, I’ll start to write a rough draft by hand.  After typing it up, sometimes months later, I’ll begin to revise.  Some stories take many, many drafts over a long period of time.  Each story has its own set of demands.  I think it was William Maxwell who said you need to respect the story as much as possible.  I throw stories away.  Sometimes I hold onto the early draft for a few years and let my subconscious do the work. I have a long credo tacked to the wall.  Part of it says:  “Do not compromise.  Go as deep as you can.  If in the end it has to be thrown away, throw it away.”

Rumpus: What do you like about short stories, and do you read more story collections or novels?

Means: That’s a tough question to answer. I like them physically—the feeling I get when I’m working, just laying it out and knowing that just over the horizon the end might be near.  When I’m working, I find it easy to carry the story around, to let it sit in my subconscious while my mind twists it and puts it under a kind of intense scrutiny and pressure.   On the other hand, one wrong move and everything can fall apart.  They demand a kind of intense poetic eye, and you can’t flinch. I relate stories to songs: you listen to a song and get a bit of a narrative along with beat and tone and sound and images; then the song fades out, or hits that final beat, and you’re left with something that’s tangible but also deeply mysterious. You listen to the song a few times and maybe it slips into your soul: then it becomes part of your life. I think that way about the stories I love—“Ping” by Samuel Beckett, “Lichen” by Alice Munro, “The Bridal Night” by Frank O’Connor, “Araby” by James Joyce–to name a few.  On the other hand, I read non-fiction and novels and poetry more than anything.

Rumpus: Has the critical success you’ve had changed the way you work at all – ie given you more confidence, or made you more self conscious?

Means: Well, I’d say good critical feedback gave me—I’m talking back when Assorted Fire Events came out—a sense that whatever I was doing might be worth doing.  It’s still just as hard as it was when I started writing stories.  I had a breakthrough years back, a moment of intense—I hesitate to use the word, but it’s the right word—epiphany, and then I said to myself, write what you want to write the way you want to write it. The key is to stay true to your vision, to the impulse that gets you started, to the characters you care about. Whatever fires your imagination should be deeply respected.  Giving interviews makes me self conscious. I don’t do many of them.  There’s a nexus where the writing meets the reader, and when I begin to answer questions, it feels to me like I’m trying to step into that space between the reader’s eye and the page.

Rumpus: Lastly, “The Secret Goldfish” has quickly become something of a classic – the book, but also the story – can you talk about all the response you’ve had for it? (Aside: Is it like when Elvis Costello got tired of singing “Allison”?)

Means: That particular story—“The Secret Goldfish” might’ve touched a nerve because it was about divorce and the isolation of child rearing combined with the serious plight of a fish.  It took place in the New York suburb.  You never really know what’s going to happen to a story.  The hope is that you do the best you can and eventually it might find some readers.  The bigger hope is that you might have the luck to write something that sticks in the craw, slips into the culture, and goes beyond what you originally thought you were doing in the first place.  Once you published the story, though, it’s out of your hands.