#writer squared

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Merrill, An Impossibility, and All Sorts of Energies: An Interview with Susan Tepper

Interviewed by Michelle Elvy

Susan, some have heard the story of how Merrill, from your novel The Merrill Diaries, came to be: you wrote a story for Pure Slush, and then the editor Matt Potter put it to you to chase Merrill down. Merrill is a restless soul, so I wonder: how hard was it to chase her down, to contain her on the page? How did her voice come to you, and how did it lead you from place to place? Did her travels unfold, for you the author, in a geographic sense, or did you pay closer attention to the rhythms of her heart and follow those as they impacted both spontaneity and flight?

This is a difficult question to put into perspective, but I’ll do my best. When I agreed to write the Merrill character, I was only certain of one thing: I had to write her ‘young’ for this book. So I started the book when she was 21 years of age, in 1976. That was also a very exciting time in my own life. I had been flying as a stewardess a few years for TWA and seeing a lot of the world. As I began to write Merrill’s story those places came back to me in a flood. I felt this tug to return to that time and those places I knew first as a young woman—just do the whole damn thing all over again. Of course in reality that’s an impossibility. But since nothing is impossible on the page, I gave it over to Merrill. Here, my soul was telling her, take this incredible journey. You see, both Merrill and I were born with the Wanderlust. It was easy to move her along in the story since she mirrors my own heart in many ways.

The book begins with spies, or at least the concept of spies, and Merrill’s deep dislike of these two particular people around her. Did you know from the get-go that this story would start the book? And in what way do you think this sets the tone for the rest of the book?

The word spies hit my brain as the first word in the book and who knows where it came from? Maybe I was watching a TV news show about spies or something. I write purely out of instinct, no pre-planning or anything. The first line of the book: “Spies have paid us a surprise visit” just came to me as I typed. It’s a line by line process that I follow when writing. I do think that particular first line sets the tone for the book in this manner: Merrill will attract nutty, quirky people all her life. For some of us, it’s like that. I have that (unfortunately), but I also draw good people (thank heavens!). It’s an energetic thing—certain energies attract certain energies. And because Merrill is an open person, she will draw in all sorts of energies, good and bad. Then it’s her job to navigate these energies so that they won’t suck the life force out of her. That’s the tricky part. Oftentimes bad energy disguises itself really well, and people can’t tell the difference. It’s Merrill’s path to get through darkness into light.

In the chapter called “The End of Innocence,” there is an opening line about Merrill being her own worst enemy. Is this really true for Merrill? Or is it true for all of us? Is Merrill, while being quite a specific character, an embodiment of us all in some way—only wearing her insecurities a little more out there on her sleeve? And is this part of that makes Merrill so compelling as a character (to write and to read)?

The chapter titled “The End of Innocence” begins like this: Some one of my husbands, or was it a boyfriend, said: Merrill you are your own worst enemy. Merrill then goes on to tell the reader: I don’t take that stuff to heart. Guys always bombard you when you’re about to leave.

I suspect she doesn’t care much what people think about her, or otherwise. She’s strong-willed and does what appeals to her. I don’t think she’s mean-spirited in any way, and she is sometimes sad and feels at sea regarding her life. Yes, I would say she pretty much wears her heart on her sleeve. But she’s not afraid of much, and when she is afraid, she manages to overcome.

As for whether she is an embodiment of others, I don’t know. Merrill is true to herself. I like that. I like that kind of strength in a woman. In men, too.

Similarly, Darnell comments that Merrill has perfect pitch, and she responds by noting it’s near perfect. Is this a moment where Merrill is being too hard on herself, or is this a moment of enlightenment?

Neither. She doesn’t have perfect pitch, her singing voice is near perfect pitch. Darnell is just throwing her a bone and she knows it and lobs it back at him. I think he’s conceited and wants to feel he has a perfect woman. And since he’s a musician of considerable talent, it plays out that he would want her perfect, too.

You’ve already mentioned your own travels and experiences. Can you comment more specifically on your own relationship to The Ritz? The Haight? London? And Pennsylvania (Merrill’s deadpan comment about PA—“a place I’d recommend as somewhere to die”—is typically acerbic and funny).

A lot of what I’ve seen in life has gone into this book. For instance, I have stayed at The Ritz Hotel in a room like the room described by Merrill. It’s the best hotel I’ve ever stayed in, so I decided Merrill should stay there. Why not?! It gave me a chance to re-visit The Ritz! But what went on during Merrill’s stay had no resemblance to my stay at The Ritz, aside from the room and descriptions of the lobby and the lobby tea.

I did live in London for a time, and also outside of London in a cottage that had the problems of Merrill’s cottage. The Haight district of San Francisco is familiar to me from my travels. It seemed a hip spot for the chapter on music. As for rural Pennsylvania, I know it from driving all over that state in my capacity as sales manager for an airline based in Philly. I saw it all and it all fascinated me. The old, run-down towns, the mills, the open flat countryside, the Poconos, long stretches of highway with strip mall after strip mall. As I started to move Merrill along on her path, I took her to places that popped into my brain.

In her blue period when Merrill meets the twins, some important things happen. This chapter ends with her discovery of what this friendship has meant to her, and what she has lost and gained. Is this a turning point in the book? And did you write it that way deliberately, or did Merrill stumble onto this realization herself?

Merrill was entranced by the twins. They made her feel happy, joyous, adored. They pulled her up from her doldrums which she calls her blue period. When she discovered some issues about the twins, it changed the whole relationship she had with them. It saddened her in a way she couldn’t quite explain. Except to say that it took some of the zest out of her life: her je ne sais quois.

 I don’t see this as a turning point in the book, but more a deepening of the Merrill character. And, no, I didn’t write it deliberately. I never know what is going to happen on the page until it happens. But I am a novelist. And always in the back of my mind is the knowledge that I must keep the narrative moving or the book dies. The way to do that is to keep building up tension. It’s an ebb and flow sort of thing you have to do with a novel.

The tag line for the book is When I don’t know what to do, I generally run away—but are there other moments which, for you, give more depth to Merrill? Because she’s not exactly always running away, is she?

Merrill is a survivor in the truest sense. And you’re right—she’s not always running. She runs when there is nothing positive happening around her. She doesn’t run away from as much as run toward something else. Hopefully better. She doesn’t stick around to be abused or used. I admire that in her. In anyone, really.

The last chapter has a great title and is a great way to end the book—both with a very specific place and event(s) and yet without a tidy wrapper on the whole. Without giving much away, I’d like to ask you about this moment at the end. Did you know when you set out to write the book where Merrill would end up? And also, there is the pervasive theme of contrasting dreams and reality in all the episodes in this book, from the opening chapter to the final one. This is a strong theme, and I wonder if it’s a theme you explore in other writing as well. Tell us why this way of looking at the world is so fascinating to you as a writer of stories.

I had no idea how this book would end, what country she would be in, what state of mind. In fact, I didn’t know what she would ‘do’ in that final pivotal scene that takes place (you know what and where). And after she did what she did, I still didn’t know how the book would end. I don’t like tidy, wrapped up endings because they don’t exist in real life. The only ending is death (as we understand it). And I wasn’t about to kill her off—Merrill is way too much fun! So I think it ended well, and kind of philosophically. Which is how things generally do end in real life, whether it’s been good, bad, or indifferent.

As for contrasting themes and reality, Calderon said it all: La vida es sueño (Life is a dream).

A manuscript editor and writer based in New Zealand, Michelle Elvy edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Blue Five Notebook. Her poetry, short stories, flash and creative non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and travel magazines. She is currently completing a collection of very short stories set across the historical landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand. She posts poetry and flash at her blog and her views on writing and editing here.

Susan Tepper grew up on Long Island where two of her recent books take place. What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G is set in The Hamptons, home of the artist Jackson Pollock. In Tepper's collection Deer & Other Stories, most of the stories are set on Long Island, or have a strong connection to The Island. Her third and most current published novel From the Umberplatzen (Wilderness House Press, 2012) is a quirky love story set in Germany and told in linked flash fiction. She has been nominated nine times for the Pushcart Prize.Deer, the title story of her collection, was nominated for NPR Selected Shorts. Her novel WHAT MAY HAVE BEEN: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G (with Gary Percesepe) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

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Don't Worry About It, You're Nowhere Near as Good as Them, So No One's Going To Notice: An Interview with Miles Klee

Interviewed by Katherine J. Lee

Illustration by C.F. Lederer

As a long-time reader and admirer of Miles Klee’s writing, I’ve been continually transported by the enormity of his creative scope and the intensity of his attentions.

It’s impossible to read his work and not feel unsettled. Miles will take you to distant, unfamiliar places. And then he’ll just leave you there, to figure it out. His characters will charm and hurt you. The force of their emotions blazes beside the casualness of their cruelty. If these dynamics seem terrible and attractive, you may love Miles Klee’s writing, as I do.

Miles Klee’s “Waiting For the Chinese” is featured in the current issue of fwriction : review. 

Your short stories are so varied in voice, style, subject matter—do you see yourself as having any common themes across your writing?

  "Themes" feels a little too ninth-grade to me but I guess we are all stuck with our hobbyhorses.

  A lot of my flaws as a writer come from what I'm trying to get at: weirdness, confusion, disrupted causality, the unexplained, the uncanny. For some of the stories in the manuscript I'm working on now, the plot may center around the breaking of a law of reality, whether that's gravity or continuity or just death. I suppose I'm into contradiction and paradox.

  It's probably more confessional than most people realize, just refracted and twisted to the point where I think I can put it out there without fear of arrest or reprisal. I get the sense readers see a darkness where, in person, I am maybe, I hope, more fun? I'm not as bleak as the prose, I can't be—this is all the stuff I have to dump so it doesn't continue to eat away at me. Why I expect anyone to be entertained by such toxic crap is a very good question indeed.

  Anything else to confess?

  Everything I write is an imitation. So many failed imitations. But also it's like—don't worry about it, you're nowhere near as good as them, so no one's going to notice.

  I love that you feel guilty about imitations. Partly, because I’m mean. And partly, because I delight in how you always seem to be apologizing for doing things you love to do. (My loved ones would say that makes me all mean.)

  Maybe my most perverse quality is this emphasis on originality when really I have just progressed from being a Vonnegut ripoff artist to a DFW and Saunders one and then onto Pynchon and Steven Millhauser and nowadays Thomas Bernhard and Lydia Davis and Barry Hannah and Michel Houellebecq and Clarice Lispector, whoever has spoken most forcefully most recently to me. I suspect the common trait for these authors is their inimitable quality—that is, they're the ones impossible to copy (though rather good impressionists themselves ... is that the pattern?).

What would a successful imitation even look like? And what is so troubling to you about imitation in writing?

You're right that successful imitation is boring, basically a parlor trick, but I remember Jim Shepard saying that his stories always started with a voice. And that is unmistakably how it works for me as well. It's only natural that discovering a new, arresting voice would inspire me to set out off in totally different directions.

  If it's just my own anxieties that tie my work to theirs, great. But it was rare to find a review of Ivyland that didn't mention one of my literary heroes. On the one hand, that's a compliment, that could be called a measure of talent. On the other hand, I felt embarrassingly transparent.

  As for the stories' actual content, there I am depressingly unimaginative. I'm someone who doesn't even remember his dreams, on average, and the worst part is, whenever you put a real thing in the fiction, that's the thing people point to and say, "I don't buy that." And it makes no difference when you protest "But that really happened! To me!" because either way you somehow failed to sell it, probably because you were too close to it and it's easier to just pull your punches. So being yourself in the narrative is often a lot more difficult than making up a ridiculous alternative.

  Saunders wrote “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” about a dream he had. Ugh, I wonder if it's possible to write a successful story about a dream.

  I saw that, and also that it took him decades to write it. Both are credible reasons for why it's far and away his worst story, though I was down on pretty much all of Tenth of December—it felt like one big mushy-neurotic monologue.

  The best is something like 2666 (sorry, I know every fiction bro loves to mansplain Bolaño), where there's a dream sequence like every eight pages, and you keep thinking: how in the world is he getting away with this? 

  You keep using phrases like "get away with,” like something about the act of writing fiction is sneaky or dishonest. Do you feel like you're looking over your shoulder when you write? Like someone expects something that you can't—or won't—give them?

  For sure. Actually it gives me unspeakable anxiety when Cece's standing right behind me. She always says, "I’m not looking!" but I feel caught out nonetheless. Maybe because fiction is also some kind of frivolity—what are you wasting your time on that for? It's a dirty hobby as far as withholding.

  Why dirty?

Because it's based in fantasy, dreamscape. I was semi-joking, but the other day I was like, "Hmm, I guess all art is pornography." You're doing it for your own or other people's pleasure, presumably.

  Heaven forbid. Though I do love the idea of reading being so pleasurable it's illicit.

  And I even feel guilty about that. "Why am I reading, I should be writing." I've had to convince myself that the reading counts as progress toward the writing. Though I'm a lot slower to get through a book than you might think. I'm better at acquiring them than opening them sometimes.

  Ha, I’ve watched you buy books before, and I’ve never seen anyone linger so raptly and tenderly over the acquisition.

  I can send you a photo of the to-read stack. It's about to topple.

I do that! I check out at least a book a day from the library, but I haven't cracked a spine in weeks. 

For me there's too much pleasure in owning them. When the time is right, I devour them, then wait for the right friend to come along that I can give them to, to make room for more. Giving away books is this endorphin-saturated event.

  As a reader, how much time do you spend thinking about another writer's process? I'm curious about what you think the relationship between reading and writing is, how one informs the other.

  If there's one thing the world doesn't need more of, it's insight into how some other writer works. The web is cluttered with these "process" pieces and I despise them. There's a great line in Springer's Progress where David Markson's character is heading out for a drink around 10 p.m., right when Kafka would have been "grinding into high gear," and he thinks to himself: So what? So what'd that depressive neurotic know?

  I’m not saying craft can't be taught, I’ve benefitted hugely from talented teachers, but by and large these "How I Write" blog posts are useless to the average aspiring author. "The Art of Fiction" can still be a good topic but to take such interviews as advice is wrong.

  You have your habits and that's that. If you want to procrastinate by finding out how other people do the thing that you're avoiding, there's not much hope for you.

  I definitely don’t think of those answers as advice on how to write, but I do think they better position me to be receptive and attuned to someone else’s project.

  Yes. And I think people need to learn to take what's valuable and leave the rest behind.

  But more than that—the ideal/target reader/audience just doesn't exist. Like, a sci-fi fan will comment that the novel was too experimental, or something, and I think, Oh Jesus, I thought that was what sci-fi does.

  More and more I am resisting the idea that even one person is going to fully understand what I’ve got going on under the hood or whatever. And that's surprisingly okay! If it's a puzzle no one ever solves, that's fine. It's almost not even for other people, they can think and theorize what they like, as long as I know what's happening (and it's even better when I don't either—it feels ecstatic, mystic, unknowable, words just unfurl). Maybe I want to object to coherence itself, since I see none of it in the world, only fantastic entropy.

  …I was just about to ask you a process question.

  I could stand to think about it.

  The question was about—“You know what you want to write about or against or around, but how do you know when you've done it?"—that sort of thing.

  Ha. That's good. I guess you know it's done when you get the feeling you couldn't add or subtract any more without destroying it. I overwrite and then I pare back extremely, then I have to add some stuff so it flows and makes some sense, then pare again, and finally you reach some equilibrium.

  Wow. That seems very straightforward. Unlike the actual thematic and literal content of your stories.

  Well, that's all so associatively batshit anyway—in the early stages of a story I'm just pulling together eight or nine things that I feel could have some harmonic resonance, so it's far less procedural. I usually don't start a story in earnest unless I feel I've hit on the right combination of elements, so that when I get underway, I'm not thinking: Hey, that flesh-eating alien has to go. I already know he belongs there.

  Along those lines—we talked about “one’s themes,” and how ninth-grade that feels. But what gets the kernel of something spinning in your head before you start?

  Usually the kernel is the connection between two things we don't immediately conjoin in our heads—one of my own favorite stories, “Everybody’s Bluffing,” is about immortal bank robbers, and only after it was done did I realize it had something to do with fame and celebrity, living forever, etc. You can naturally extend or surreally embellish the themes that life hands you ready-made.

  I love that story so much. Did that come together really quickly? The tone and voices and characters and plot work so perfectly for me—

  It took maybe a year, all told. Just hard to nail everything down. I think because it has that noir-ish voice it feels fast and loose.

  I rewrote the opening a million times and then the ending was near impossible. The middle sequences stayed the same, but to get in and out of that world was tough. It's supposed to seem horizonless on either end, like it's infinitely repeating one loop.

  Well, it's operating seamlessly, as your voice-driven stories often do. But I also have favorite stories of yours—I’m thinking right now of “XX” and “The Milkman’s Exhaustion”—that seem to be built on very different, difficult foundations.

  Yeah, these kinds of stories and the novel are not for everyone, both structurally and otherwise. You could certainly call them difficult, but I hope in some sense they reflect the difficulty and confusion of life itself, which as we know doesn't unfold with the grace of real narrative. So you get stories that don't end, or twist in on themselves, or are just relentlessly hammering a singular obsession, because that's the experience I've known—

  Oh, I don't mean difficult like, "make it easier"—

  I've tried sitting down and writing something that goes from point A to B to C but I get the same comments. I guess I want my fiction to feel more like you’re getting bounced around in a pinball machine than unraveling a sweater.

  I meant I really love the moment I hit a snag in a Miles Klee story and then sort of see you make that decision: not to make it simple, not to do a glib writer trick, and massage in epiphany or revelation or insight -- you sort of locate the unconventional, wrong, awkward, unacceptable thing and you just sort of live with it… Maybe this doesn't make any sense—

  No, I get it!

  When I read your work, I think I can feel you on the other side of the story, perversely thrilling when a resolution is left more opaque and rocky than a reader might expect or enjoy.

  One anxiety I always have is, "Will the reader know this was intentional?"

  Ha, right—my description of you was going to be “exhibitionist in pitch dark.”

  When you step back from the brink you want to trust that the reader knows why, or believes they eventually will. Unfortunately, in a lot of my stories, the answer comes down to something like "You'll never know, sorry."

  Whether people see the Socratic wisdom in that is sometimes a long shot.

  I was going to comment that it must be sort of relaxing or freeing to write with that objective, but I feel like you are somehow guilted by the decision anyway.

  Definitely. “Why would anyone enjoy something with no answers…”

  But answers are always disappointing for me. I love reading noir mysteries. And I hate getting to the ends of them, because there are no surprises—no twist is good enough. It's money, sex, blackmail, greed: all the usual suspects. Even Chandler and Hammett books are wrapped up in the most preposterous ways, because no one cares about solving the mystery. If they did, they'd read the first chapter and then skip to the last page.

  People care about the 200 pages of mystery, in between. I like the idea that the suspended chord of those middle chapters can be the entire work. My favorite Hitchcock film is The Birds, because it starts in the middle and ends in the middle.

Miles Klee is the author of Ivyland, a finalist in the 2013 Tournament of Books that The Wall Street Journal described as "J.G. Ballard zapped with a thousand volts of electricity." His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Unstuck, Lapham's Quarterly, The Collagist, 3:AM, The White Review and elsewhere. He lives in Manhattan with the screenwriter C.F. Lederer, his wife.

Katherine J. Lee is a writer and artist living in the Midwest. She is working on a short story collection in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of dislocate. 

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What Only You Could Write: An Interview with Ashley Stokes

Interviewed by Lander Hawes

Ashley Stokes writes stories which cover a fictional ground that I once regarded as impassable, and his writing incorporates wildly divergent ends that I once considered irreconcilable. His work is both highly literary and extremely funny; it is as socially and politically attuned as it is tenderly private and intimate; it is, by turns, both subjective and objective in its treatment of obsession, sentimentality and nostalgia. 

One of the reasons I’ve continued to read, and champion, Ashley’s work is that I think he writes colorfully about the colorlessness of regional English suburbia. He explores the tendency of this milieu to be defined in negatives and contrasts, and fictionalizes very adeptly the consequences of this for the inhabitants.

His short story, "Temple and Space," is currently featured at fwriction : review for Short Story Month.

You write proficiently in both the long and the short form. Do you find it easy to work in both forms?

Any story idea can work itself up to the long or boil itself down to the short form, but a writer has a natural instinct for what he or she wants for a story. With short story ideas I usually have a precise feeling for length, or I’ve been asked for stories of a certain word count by a magazine or website and thus I know it has to be 2,000 or 3,000 words. About switching forms, Flannery O’Connor once said that it can be like escaping from the woods only to be ravaged by the wolves, meaning that each form poses a separate series of problems. 

What do you think are differences in emphasis between the forms? Are there, for example, different structural priorities?

One very obvious difference, for me, is that I need to know what’s going to happen with a short story. A novel is more of an exploratory reconnaissance mission to begin with. But I’ve  often thought about a short story for a long time before committing to it, so it’s been prepped and marinaded as an idea and a lot of fat trimmed away and discarded on the work surface so to speak. However, with a novel I tend to find that you start and it changes continually until it settles. With a novel, there’s what I call the ‘springboard moment’ where after your run-up you hit the board and can see the whole thing. That’s harder to find with a short story, especially if want to avoid the forty or fifty drafts writers who didn’t plan, say Carver or O’Conner, talk about.

Do you have any particular influences in your writing? Do you find it possible to isolate particular influences? Have you found that your experience of the influence of influences has changed as you’ve matured as a writer?

I can certainly isolate certain writers whose work always amazes me. There’s a rite of passage you go through, where you emulate the qualities of writers you admire, then let go of them. I do feel quite schizophrenic as a writer, though, in that sometimes I want to write very elegiac, realist stories, and sometimes I want to write very experimental, broken up, fragmentary, disquieting texts-within-texts. I can never quite settle and sometimes those two modes converge to make the writing different. It’s very important to write what only you could write. 

I’ve lost patience with a lot of the writers who once inspired me, for example Paul Auster, I find him not so interesting now when I loved his early novels; also Ian McEwan feels bleached out to me. I learnt a lot about making a sentence crackle from Martin Amis, but I don’t read him much now. In contrast, a writer like Fitzgerald, who I’ve always loved, I find more in every time I read him. There’s a texture to his writing, a certain precision, a certain color and also a way of handling imaginative obsession that continues to fascinate me. 

If, as you get older, you can return to novels you’ve loved and find more dimensions to them, that’s a fantastic thing. There are certain passages in Crime and Punishment that I often return to. Also, I like the way Ballard merges the interior and exterior in someone, so the landscape becomes his psychological state. I’ve gone through a phase of often thinking, "how would Philip Roth write this?" as I like the way his characters argue with the world (not that I can write like Roth). A writer is always involved in a discussion with literature, with other texts, and a story becomes defined by being distinct from, and an argument for or against other texts. However, a writer’s vision is personal, discrete, so it’s again a case of writing what only you could write. 

When I started to write "Abyssinia" in The Syllabus of Errors, I aspired to emulate Robert Stone’s story "Coping," (or at least I’d thought I’d like to write a story like "Coping,"that had its effect) but that went out of the window as soon as the story got going and I became preoccupied by a certain interior dynamic in the protagonist, Mellis. In a story I’ve written since finishing Syllabus, "If All Things Remain Equal," I was very interested in a Lydia Davis story called "Breaking It Down." But I certainly couldn’t write a story in the way that Davis often does, and my story contains no trace elements of her story. I find ideas tend to develop their own scenic structure and dynamic.

The stories in The Syllabus of Errors have recurring motifs and moods: Berlin, cigarettes at dawn, urban cityscapes and other noir-ish elements. Has this literary iconography always been present in your fiction?

To a certain extent, yes. With Syllabus I wrote three stories, and then five stories, and then realized that there were these recurring things going on that I could extrapolate into a larger, longer, self-referential narrative. 

So, there are certainly recurring moods. I do like a kind of Central European thick, Joseph Roth-Thomas Mann-like atmosphere: the architecture and masonry, fogginess, fragments of old empires and lost times. I encountered these images early and they will always be with me, but they’re frequently in a landscape of the imagination that exists within a character who wants something that he or she can’t have. If there is genealogy that runs backwards from Syllabus to Touching the Starfish to earlier stories, it is this sense of yearning.

The characters in The Syllabus of Errors often stand at the threshold of, or are in the aftermath of, major life events. As a story writer, what draws you to these episodes in your characters’ lives? 

It’s ultimately about what happens when you reach the terminus. I do think of the stories in Syllabus as all ending: I don’t really like slice-of-life stories; I like stories to feel terminal. Often my characters have been living with an obsession; a yearning for a figure or object he or she wants back or misses or can’t have. The stories in Syllabus force yearning to the surface; the drillhead breaks through. Maybe there’s a Fitzgerald thing going on here. I mean in The Great Gatsby, dreams and aspiration ultimately destroy characters like Gatsby and Myrtle Wilson. I was watching the Woody Allen documentary recently where he talks about living in a state of romantic obsession is much better than real life, but if you step out of the dream, real life will crush you.

Do you think that British men are particularly prone to feelings like these? Is there a potent mix of British history and contemporary British experience that creates unrealistic yearnings and desires? Do you find yourself consciously articulating a vision of British masculinity? 

There’s a passage in "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," where David, the main character is asked "When did the child in you die? And when did the adult fail? When were you left only with the adolescent?" This seems to have struck a chord with quite a few of my male friends of my age. But I wouldn’t say I was consciously trying to give voice to the private fears of the English male. The type of men I write about I don’t see very much in British fiction. I see many more professionals in peril or chestwig-wearing working class sentimentalists or boring balsa wood constructs designed to illustrate some idea about language or consciousness. The type of men I’ve often written about tend to be frustrated grammar school boys, "rootless and anxious," as Richard Hoggart puts it in The Uses of Literacy. Most of my male (and some of the female) characters are quite "superfluous" people. They’re not really doing very much. They feel keenly that they’ve missed out or been passed over, that they’re not part of the culture, certainly not mainstream masculine culture. There’s a sense of belatedness in their lives and often a perceived encirclement, that the world is against them. The small things get over-dreamed. That’s what I’m interested in articulating here. It certainly speaks up for itself in stories like "Island Gardens," "Abyssinia," "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," and the title story in particular. 

In The Syllabus of Errors, was there a story that was hardest to write? Why?

It depends what you mean by hardest. For example, the story "The First Suggestion of Night"—a fictionalized account of the 1923 assassination of the Italian socialist politician Matteoti—was hard to write for a technical reason. I hadn’t been to Rome for a very long time and there are many more useful books on Berlin in the 20s than Rome. I’d been to Berlin several times and had a lot of books, so writing an apparently more complex story like "The Prettiest Girl in Berlin"was comparatively easier. Getting the details right for "The First Suggestion"was hard, which is maybe why that story is short (unlike "The Prettiest Girl"). That’s quite a technical difficulty, though, one that can be addressed by hard work and awareness of the pitfalls.  

In terms of a personal difficulty, I felt emotionally spent after writing the last two stories in Syllabus. With another non-Syllabus story I wrote soon afterwards, "The Swan King," they formed a kind of triptych for me. I found "Abyssinia," the penultimate story, very emotional because I was putting somebody through the ringer in quite a profound way, and I had to live that. And then the final story, "I Remember Nothing," was also fairly difficult, because it had to knit together all the other stories and, perversely, seed them, as all of the stories in Syllabus emerge from under the overcoat of "I Remember Nothing." I suppose this is more of a novelist’s problem, in that I hadn’t conceived of a collection, let alone a sequence but now I had to make it work as a whole, not just a series of isolated stories. I was also worried how that story would be perceived as well, whether people would think that I actually had been or am a Nazi. Nazism in Syllabus is Nazism, but it also stands in for believing wholeheartedly in something impossible, ridiculous and dangerous, Walter Abish’s "dream to end all dreams."

Sometimes a story presents a personal problem that you don’t really want to touch, because if you do it’ll make you look vulnerable, stupid, a failure, pathetic, excluded. Then sometimes problems are purely technical, like how the hell am I going to reconstruct this period of time, be convincing, show range but write as economically as possible. 

The characters in your stories often have romantic attachments to, and yearnings for, continental European cities? Is this a feeling you share?

Yes and no. The yearnings the characters have are usually unrealistic; they’re a bit like Wheelers’ yearning for Paris in Revolutionary Road; they’re never going to get there and if they did it would never be as they expect. But, having spent my teenage years obsessively reading novels and history books about early twentieth century Europe, and coming from a London suburb where nobody really travelled much except to resorts, I’ve always had a hankering to live in Europe, Berlin in particular, but at the same time I’m well aware that such an experience wouldn’t be what I think it would be. That’s really what I play with in Syllabus, that it’s all in the dreaming. There’s a massive thunderhead of belatedness in the stories; for example, David in "Tomorrow Belongs To Me," he doesn’t just want to live in Berlin, he wants to live in Berlin in the twenties. This can only be achieved by sinking into a quietly destructive and ultimately embarrassing fantasy life. You don’t need to transport yourself to be an exile these days.  

But I like the compass points in Syllabus. There are two stories with French themes: "Ultima Thule" and "Storming the Bastille;" there are several Berlin themed stories, there’s a story set in Rome, there are two Russian stories as well. But fitting these visions of abroad into the delusions of the lower middle class, overeducated, under-achieving English man; to place a European longing into a suburban English setting seems to me incredibly interesting and funny. I think we all hanker after an elsewhere but reach a certain age when we realize that if we did arrive there we’d probably make ourselves lonely, or lonelier.

What are your writing plans for the immediate future?

Well, having thought I was through with short stories after finishing Syllabus, I had some commissions and then more ideas for short stories, and then realized I was writing another book. So now I’m trying to finish that off. The book won’t be a sequence of stories like The Syllabus of Errors. It’ll be a more orthodox collection. The Syllabus male has been largely banished and there are certainly more female protagonists. It’ll have a mixture of long and short and contemporary and historical, straight and comic stories again and will include the stories published last year in Fleeting magazine, the Warwick Review, and Unthology. It’s called The Susceptibles. The stories are all about dupes. In "Trans-Neptune," a story of mine that appeared in Unthology No.3, one of the characters talks about the world becoming full of susceptibles, that we can all be conned in some way. To find out how someone is susceptible is to seduce them. So, I’ve been working on that.

Also I’m thinking that I must start to write something more sustained. Writing Syllabus opened lots of doors for me; it was like an advent calendar after writing a long novel about  something close to home: teaching creative writing. I’ve realized I can write about lots of things that I didn’t realize I could beforehand. So I’m thinking of, very tentatively, writing a novel set during the year of hyper-inflation in Berlin. I feel The Syllabus of Errors revealed new spaces for me, and so it is time to tackle something on a bigger scale: an intellectual, atmospheric novel but also a fast-paced one. I’d like to bridge the gap between long short story and short novel. That’s the way I’m thinking at the moment. 

Lander Hawes is the author of the novel Captivity, published by Unthank Books.

Ashley Stokes’ first novel, Touching the Starfish, was published by Unthank Books in 2010. His first collection, The Syllabus of Errors, was published by Unthank in 2013 and has been longlisted for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. His stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including fwriction: review, and he’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times. He is currently working on a second short story collection, The Susceptibles, and a novella, The North Surrey Gigantopithecus. He lives in Norwich, England.

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The Weird Is All Right: An Interview with Kevin Wilson

Interviewed by Chris Poole

As a teacher, a friend, and an exceptional writer, Kevin Wilson has shown me what fiction is capable of. Specifically, he reassured me that the weird was all right, that it could be pursued and manipulated—actually injected into the everyday world to make something that was wholly new and yet very recognizable. All of his works reveal that a fictionalized world can be most realistic in its weirdest moments. Recalling his stories, I can immediately picture the grandmother for hire, the flock of paper cranes rising on a burst of fanned air, the two misfit lovers exchanging static shocks in the dark. They risk sounding merely quirky when condensed into these neat little snapshots, but the stories that bloom from these oddities all speak to us in a shared language made fresh through strange mutations. The weird is weird, but not so foreign.

Kevin Wilson is the author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, a collection of short stories, as well as last year’s The Family Fang, a novel that explores the peculiar little worlds that families build for themselves. In this case the family doubles as a troupe of performance artists. Mr. Wilson has also published a steady stream of short fiction in print and online journals. His flash fiction pieces particularly showcase his knack for creating worlds of the weird. His recent story, “Ashes,” is now available in fwriction : review and should be read by everyone everywhere right now. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Mr. Wilson about this story, flash fiction, and “weird shit.”

  There’s always something weird afoot in your works. The people and worlds you create are always believable, always based in a real world, and yet you hone in on the bizarre aspects of that reality, whether it’s through the personality of an off-kilter narrator, like the fellow in “Ashes,” or through the circumstances that your characters find themselves in, such as the Fang’s family dynamic. What draws you to the weird? Is “the weird” the best way to phrase this…weirdness?

“Weird Shit” ought to be an official genre label. You should wrangle together a movement. Care to write the group’s manifesto?

I heard Kelly Link use “weird shit” as a term for a kind of fiction. It was at a conference and I still think it was the most valuable thing I’ve learned at a panel. I believe it was China Miéville who came up with the term, but I can’t quite remember. It is a nice genre label, though, isn’t it?

What brought “Ashes” about? Did you see a particular image or action before you began to write the story?

I have a friend from high school that I haven’t talked to in years, but we are friends on Facebook. Mostly he talks about football in his status updates. One day, he wrote, in all caps, about how he was going to beat the shit out of this other guy, a guy I kind of remember from high school. In the comments after the status update, people kept telling him to calm down and not do anything stupid. He then explained why he was so angry, something about being accused of stealing prescription meds, but he then, as an aside, mentioned that the guy had been telling people that he had put his dick in the ashes of my friend’s deceased girlfriend. After that, people just kept saying to stay calm and that the guy wasn’t worth going to jail. And I kept waiting for someone to ask about the ashes-dick situation, but no one did. And I was too embarrassed to ask. So I wrote this story instead.

How does inspiration, in general, work for you? Do you get a vision of large swaths of your story or do you start with a small kernel and run with it?

I rarely have a larger idea of how a story will work. I have a small piece of the story, a detail or line or, like this story, someone’s dick in someone else’s ashes. Then I just build around that moment. Sometimes, the initial idea gets cut out of the story. It’s a starting point for me to expand and find out what the story is really about.

Care to share any little gems that you’ve left on the cutting room floor recently?

Generally, they don’t stay on the cutting room floor for long. I recycle them into new stories. I’ve had a person get stabbed in the back of the head so many times, even though I’ve already published a story where this happens. I just keep trying to figure out new ways to get that into a story.

Things start out strange in your stories and they get stranger as the story progresses. When I read your work, I always sense an escalating energy driving the narrative forward, and I know that, at any moment, things can take a very unnerving turn. How far do you feel you have to push your story beyond your own comfort zone as you write it? Do you think a writer has any obligations to take their stories into unknown or even disturbing directions?

Most of the time, my characters are unstable; they might be kind or decent people, but they have an aspect of instability in their nature. As a result, usually when they try to address some minor issue, they do something weird that causes even more chaos. So I generally take an unstable element, the character, and see how it reacts to the narrative. Usually, it gets weird. Once one thing gets thrown out of whack, it’s hard to see it getting back to normal and it starts to spiral.

Weirdness is comfortable for me, so, in some ways, it’s a crutch. It’s how I figure out the story, pushing it in a strange direction and seeing what results. Which is why, honestly, a lot of my stories fail, because sometimes it’s just weirdness for no real reason. Or I have to pull back and try to add more depth and shading to the narrative, to make it more understandable for me. I don’t think a writer has much of an obligation to anyone or anything, other than to tell a compelling story. And, even then, that’s a debatable position. But my favorite writers generally try to take something understandable and familiar and bend it into a strange shape.

It sounds like a lot of playful experimentation goes into constructing these stories. Would you say that a sense of freedom underlies the whole writing process? How long can this freedom to play last as you move into the revision process?

It is a lot of experimentation. It’s like doing science without any background in science, trying to mix chemicals together until something interesting happens. I think revision is when you start to figure out the invisible structure that supports the story, so I tend to try and lock some aspects down and figure out what’s going on with it. But, in the beginning, that idea that it’s all just messing around is helpful for me.

Have much do you revise the concept or events in a story? Besides changes made to style in structure, how different was your first draft of “Ashes” to the final product? Have you written any stories where the opposite is true?

I changed very little of this story from the first draft. With the novel or with longer short stories, I’m revising every sentence as I write, going back to the beginning and editing with each new sentence. It takes a while. With flash fiction, a form that I love very much, I try to ride the wave of the story and not get pulled under. In doing so, the language is usually a little more elastic, the syntax a little stranger, and I like to keep that as it is, to try not to revise away the imperfection of it. They’re little fever dreams. They don’t respond well to massive overhauls.

Are there any writers that stand above all others as major influences? Is there anything that you have read recently that has made you rethink your own writing or the state of fiction today?

I have a lot, Carson McCullers and Shirley Jackson being two of the biggest, but I think, as far as transforming the way I thought about stories, Aimee Bender and George Saunders were the two major writers for me. I read them in college, when I was first figuring out how to write, and they radically reshaped my idea of how to tell a story. I fell in love instantly with their work; it was amazing and funny and heartfelt and so original. I developed painful, all-encompassing crushes on these two writers. I wanted them to marry and then adopt me. They took elements of magical realism and fairy tales and turned them into contemporary forms that resonated with me. I can’t imagine what my writing would look like if I hadn’t read them so early on. And, just as importantly, they pushed me into other interesting writers that also affected me.

There are so many amazing writers out there. It makes me happy to know how many different styles and genres are being exploded by new writers, people indebted to the writers who came before but also doing something new. I just read new books by Elliot Holt, Nina McConigley, Matthew Simmons, and Owen King, all books that are forthcoming, and they are so different and yet so amazing.

You’ve written a novel as well as numerous short and flash fiction pieces. A novel is, naturally, a wholly different creature from a short story, but even creating a flash fiction piece can be a very different process from writing a fifteen-to-thirty-page story. When you write a story, do you know ahead of time, “This will be a short story” or “This will be a short-short story”? Does one form appeal to you over the other?

I start out always thinking, “this is a novel” or “this is flash fiction.” I think it gives me the confidence to actually begin writing, to think that I know what it will be. What’s strange is when it resists that definition. It’s terrifying, sometimes, when what you think is a novel turns out to be two good sentences. It’s also interesting when what you think is a flash fiction turns out to need so much more space to finally work. So I guess I try to define what it will be, but it doesn’t always work out this way. Oftentimes, I think, “This will be a good story” and it turns out to be awful. So what do I know?

I can’t imagine working in one form. I like to try each of them and be reminded of how they each allow for certain aspects of my style.

Are you working on all three forms right now? Do you have anything else on your plate besides flash fiction pieces like “Ashes”?

Well, you and I write and share a story each month, 1,000 words each, so that’s my main output at this moment. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be very sad. I am working on a new novel and I have a longer short story that I’m outlining, so there are things at play.

Chris Poole is from Harrison, Tennessee and graduated from the University of the South with a degree in English and Russian. He has had one story published in the Fall 2012 issue of Waccamaw. He currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee and works as a librarian.

Kevin Wilson is the author of a story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Harper Perennial, 2009), which won the Shirley Jackson Award, and a novel, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011). He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee.

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Hot Flashes: An Interview with Kim Chinquee

Interviewed by Len Kuntz

Kim Chinquee is an inimitable voice in the writing world, one that makes us rethink both the way we read, as well as how we tell stories. Her truncated works are blisters of the human soul, sticks of lit dynamite ready to explode. In some pieces, Chinquee creates a shattered world in as few as one hundred words. Indeed, she was well entrenched in the field of flash fiction writing long before most had ever heard of the form. Her two collections, Oh Baby and Pretty, are masterworks to be studied by any aspiring writer.

Chinquee’s work has been likened to Giacometti’s sculptures and Raymond Carver at his apex. At once both complex and brilliantly spare, Chinquee is able to twist seemingly mundane moments into harsh reflections on the human condition. Her characters suffer and struggle, discover and discard, while the sting of their aftermath singes the reader’s consciousness.

Recently I was fortunate to get some insight into Chinquee’s methodology and philosophy. As I’d suspected, she was refreshingly open and ever humble.

You were one of the earliest practitioners of flash fiction, writing extremely short works before anyone had even heard of the form. The piece, “Oh Baby,” which is also the title of your first collection, is in fact only a paragraph long, yet it is replete with brooding, symbolism and underlying angst. What do you expect from flash fiction as a reader, and what do you hope to achieve with the form as a writer?

I think flash fiction has been around a long time! I'm not sure I'm its earliest practitioner—thought it's quite an honor to be considered! Thank you. And thanks for the words about "Oh Baby."

How often do you write? Do you have a routine? And what gets you started on a new piece?

I try to write every day, or I plan to. I don't have much of a writing routine, though I tend to write at night. I tend to go in spurts. I use prompt words almost every day, or some days I use other prompts. I host an online writing group called Hot Pants, and the prompt words there usually get me going.

It seems like you love to mire your characters in tense situations. There’s always some conflict at work, yet you don’t always resolve it in the usual blunt way, instead often leaving it up to the reader to draw his/her own conclusions. Is that how you see it, or is the outcome clear to you?

Early on one of my teachers, Frederick Bartheleme, said to always start the story in the center of conflict. I try to remember that. I think in life, there's never really a solid conclusion, or resolution. I hope to give the reader credibility, to be at the heart of the conflict, and I think sometimes just the realization of conflict, and the smallest step towards resolution is resolution in itself.

In many ways, your writing echoes that of Raymond Carver. Was he an influence? Who else shaped you stylistically?

Wow, that's a very nice compliment. Thank you. I love Carver's work. My first creative writing teacher, Tom Williams, assigned Carver and also Gardner, so I had these influences in my early days of writing fiction. In graduate school I studied at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers with Frederick Barthelme and Steve Barthelme and Mary Robison—I wrote my first flash in Robison's class.

Then I attended the University of Illinois, where I studied under the direction of Jean Thompson, Richard Powers and Philip Graham. I also read a lot of Lydia Davis and Diane Williams—Diane Williams has also been a great teacher to me, working with me on several stories that I've sent to NOON over the years.

Who are some of your current favorite flash writers and why?

Oh, all of the above I just mentioned! I admire so many. I love Davis' quirkiness and insight, and how Williams' work always surprises me. I admire every issue of NOON and its writers. So many others, and especially the writers in my writing group.

What words of advice would you give to the novice writer, and also to the established writer who may sometimes wonder, “Why does what I’m doing matter?”

That's a good question. I struggle with that, and especially lately, but then I have to remind myself that I started writing because I love to write—I did not write with intentions to publish. This may sound silly, or cliché, but writing matters to me because writing makes me feel good, it keeps me thinking, it makes me real, it makes me feel alive! Even though it's tough sometimes, writing makes me happy! That may not be the case for everyone, of course, but I think that question can apply to anything. Why does anything matter to anything? That's getting a little crazy, but that's what I do when I start thinking about it too much. If it doesn't matter, then don't do it, and don't stress out about it and do something else.

Can you tell us what are you working on now, and what you may have on the horizon?

I currently have a short story collection and a novel circulating with publishers. This summer Ravenna Press is publishing my collection, Pistol in a Book with two other authors, as part of their Triple Series. I've just compiled two additional flash collections, and I'm working on a new novel unlike anything I've ever written! I hope to have that finished very soon.

Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State whose work appears widely online and in print. Additionally, Len is an editor at the online literary magazine Metazen. Len’s story collection from Aqueous Books debuts in 2014. You can find him at lenkuntz.blogspot.com.

Kim Chinquee is the author of the collections Oh Baby, Pretty, and Pistol. Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies including The Nation, The Huffington Post, NOON, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fiction, The Mississippi Review, The Notre Dame Review, The South Carolina Review, New York Tyrant, Best of the Web 2010, The Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses 2007, and many others. She is an associate professor of English at Buffalo State College.

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I think what is most important is arriving at a confidence and assurance in your own work. However that may come.

from Happy Stories are Bad Literature: An Interview with Robert Kloss, interviewed by Kenny Mooney for fwriction : review's Writer Squared series 

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...that’s how I learn to write and to translate: by reading.

Susan Bernofsky, as interviewed by Laura Brown, for our Writer Squared series

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Uncharted Sentences: An Interview with Susan Bernofsky

Interviewed by Laura Brown

I first came to know and love Susan Bernofsky through her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, a breathtaking novel spanning across generations of characters from the Weimar Republic to the fall of the Berlin Wall, anchored together by a piece of land just outside of Berlin. I went on to read her translation of Robert Walser’s The Tanners, Berlin Stories, and Erpenbeck’s The Old Child and Other Stories. Tawada is next on my list.

It’s a bit of an understatement to say I was starstruck when I met Bernofsky in person at this year's Festival Neue Literatur, which she organized. The festival invited six German-speaking authors to New York, providing a chance to showcase their writing—through readings and in-depth discussions—not yet published in the US. What came across most poignantly when speaking with Bernofsky, both then and now, is her earnestness, her enthusiasm  for translation and world literature. Her love for and dedication to translation pulls readers in, holds them, makes them care for the work as deeply as Bernofsky.

In addition to her various translation projects, a biography of Walser she’s working on, and her own novel, Bernofsky teaches translation at Queens College CUNY. Perhaps, though, what is most striking is the amount of time she carves out to post on her own blog, Translationista. It’s a web portal of translation advocacy, a conduit for translators, writers, and readers to connect to the importance and beauty of world literature. Here, she shares with aspiring translators various grants available, translation programs to participate in, and gives glimpses into her own translating process. Lovers of world literature should certainly grab a Kaffee and set up shop outside Bernofsky's virtual window.

She generously agreed to speak with me about her fascinating and meticulous translation process, how she became engaged with the German language in particular, and her predictions for who the next big translated authors could and should be.

You started practicing translation as early as high school. What particularly drew you to the German language, especially at such a young age?

Well, I originally started learning German in a really random way: my dad had to learn German because he was a biochemist, and in his generation all serious science students had to study German because, early in the twentieth century, that was the language of science. He had learned it for professional reasons, and he kind-of pushed me to take it. So that’s why I originally took it, but then I immediately loved it and kept taking it because I really enjoyed it. I had a great, great teacher name Julia Schuler in my public high school in New Orleans, Louisiana, and I studied four years of it because I liked it so much. But I never planned on doing anything with it, you know. It was just sort of recreational. 

At fwriction : review, we value transparency in the writing process. That it isn’t just a magician’s work but is an exercise that requires time with actual pen to paper, followed by extensive revision. Can you speak to us a little about your own translation process and what that’s like?

I revise like crazy. I never stop revising. The first draft of everything, I do really quickly and terribly. My first draft is completely, outrageously horrible, and then I revise, I revise the thing into submission. Literally, if you saw my first draft, you’d be embarrassed for me. 

It sounds like you’re taking on the role of editor.

Translating basically is editing. It’s the part of writing that is editing. The first draft is really easy; I mean—all right, if it’s hard to understand the original then it isn’t easy—doing the first draft of a translation is not such a big deal, which is what I’m trying constantly to convince my students of. Because I get my translation students to translate, and they do and think they’re done. And I say, “No, actually, you aren’t, you just got started.” And they’re like, “Wait, no.  I’ve turned it in, I’m done, see, it’s finished.” Then me, “No, actually not, you just got started.”

My things tend to go through four drafts. Right now, I’m working on the nineteenth century horror story The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf, and it was written in the 1840’s; I’m looking up all the words in the Oxford English dictionary, all my English words, to see when they entered the English language. Because I don’t want to use words that were not yet part of the English vocabulary then. And I have Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein open on my computer, so if I’m trying to decide between words, I’ll search for that word in her story to see what kind of vocabulary she was using. She was writing a little earlier than that, but she feels pretty contemporary. 

How acquainted do you typically become with an author before starting on a translation project, such as doing research about the author’s life, or do you let his/her voice percolate from the writing alone?

It really varies greatly depending on the context of the project. I do sample translations for publishers all the time, where I’m just doing fifteen page excerpts from the text, and I don’t take the time to do deep analysis then. But like with Jeremias Gotthelf, right now I’m having to research; I’m in the middle actually of researching his religious background because a lot of the story I’m translating is all built up around a frame tale involving a tulsa, which in English can either be a christening or baptism. And I need to find out for sure, very quickly, which it is, because the two words—christening and baptism—have been sort of used in alternation, interchangeably. In certain historical contexts, they can both mean the same thing or different things. So, I’m doing a lot of research to make the judgment call on which word appropriately represents this situation, in Switzerland, in the 1840’s. He also refers, in the 1840’s story, back to a seventeenth century practice, so right now it’s looking like it’s going to be baptism, but I’m not done researching. If the research isn’t done right, the translation may be wrong and then some religious scholar will say, “Oh you’ve got it wrong! It’s absurd to talk about a christening in 1840’s Switzerland.”

Has working on [Robert] Walser’s biography differed from working on his prose, and in what ways have there been overlaps? 

I mean, in a sense, that answer is mainly no, because I’ve sort-of been working on his biography since I started translating him because when I started on his work, when I was really young, I read every single thing I could find about him. Now there is so much about him that you wouldn’t be able to read it all, but at the time there wasn’t that much about him and you could read it all, so every last thing about his life which you could read about, I was reading about; there was never a time when I wasn’t also trying to learn about his life. For most authors and most projects there would be different activities, but because of the way I came to him, it just happened there wasn’t that much difference. And he writes about his own life so much that all of these things are intertwined.

Do you have a particular favorite kind of writing genre to translate: novel, short story, essay or non-fiction? Or a particular genre you like to utilize as a writer?

Oh, that is interesting, to use in my own writing. I’m working on a novel and write short fiction. But not at all like [Walser’s]. I really love translating his little shorts—he calls them prose pieces—a cross between a story and an essay. That’s kind of my favorite of his to translate; although, if he had written another novel that we have, I would love to translate that too, but we are all out of novels for him. So, that’s out, but I love, love, love translating the shorts prose texts. They will have a specific tone, they will be a few pages long, you will start out with the tone that might stay the same or change. You can really watch him model in that shape. I really enjoy trying to follow how he models these short texts. 

I’ve heard word that you are currently working on your own novel, set in New Orleans. Can you tell us a little about it?

It’s partly set in post-Katrina New Orleans, but it’s a multi-generational book about a woman who is displaced in Katrina and winds up going in search of her Grandma’s roots in Europe. Much of the book is set in Europe, but the frame story is set in New Orleans after Katrina.

Is there a German author that you’ve read that hasn’t been translated into English yet, that you think should?

I want someone to publish The Beautiful and the Necessary by Andrea Grill, who came over in the Festival Neue Literatur here. It’s a book about these two Austrian down-and-out losers. It’s kind of like the odd couple, they’re roommates. They don’t know what to do with themselves to make a buck, so they come up with this scheme to kidnap a civet cat because the most expensive coffee in the world is made from coffee beans that have been eaten by a civet cat and pooped out. Something about going through the digestive system—this is not a joke—of the cat does something magical to the coffee that makes it extra good. So, it’s a farce, but it’s a kind of a philosophical farce, and it’s extremely well written. Very wise and fun, but it’s much more than that. I’d like to see someone pick that book up.

Also, someone should pick up Larissa Boehning’s book Das Glück der Zikaden, or in English, The Song of the Cicadas. It’s a three generational novel about a grandmother, mother, and daughter. It starts out in Russia with a young family fleeing Stalin then wind up in Berlin and eventually in Spain; it’s incredibly, smartly written. She read from that book, but we let the authors choose their own excerpts, and I think the one she picked was not actually a good representative of her book. She picked one that is its own neat, little episode. But you can’t actually tell from the excerpt how powerful the book is. It’s a much better book than is obvious from that excerpt.

I remember her reading: it was the when the family was traveling and the little girl wants her frog.  

Yeah, exactly, and they’re on a train. It’s not even a frog, it’s a tadpole. 

Oh no! 

Yeah, Larissa kept saying “little frog.” I was trying to teach her the word “tadpole” behind the scenes. I’m told her it’s different from little frog, tadpole is not the same as little frog, but she kept forgetting the word tadpole and saying little frog. Whatever. But, of course, the child in the story doesn’t know any better, she keeps saying my frog, my frog, I want my frog back. Yeah, yeah, it wasn’t a frog in the jar, it was a tadpole. But that scene, the great part of that scene is that the woman looks in the mirror and sees that her hair has turned white, just like that, on this trip. But I think [Larissa] somehow wound up not even reading that part. She didn’t represent her book that well, but it’s an utterly gorgeous, moving book. It’s very rich, just psychologically rich, and really goes into the mother-daughter bond, and they’re all very difficult bonds, difficult relationships, gorgeously described; the prose is beautiful. I would love to see someone pick up that book and publish it. 

One of your “Rules for Translators” is to, “Read lots and lots of gorgeous books at all times so that your head will constantly be filled with the cadences of literary greatness.” 

Yes, I must have been drunk.

But I think it’s true, I think it’s true for writers, too. With that in mind, what has been on your reading list lately?

Okay, then I was sober.

Right now, I’m reading Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun. I’m only like forty pages in, but it’s a gorgeous book so far. I try to read all the time. This is a step. I read literature in translation because I love world literature, and this is a really beautiful book translated [from the Arabic] by Humphrey Davies at Archipelago Books. But usually I’m trying to read people who write beautiful, beautiful English language prose because that’s how I learn to write and to translate: by reading. So, I’ll read contemporary pieces. I read Emily Barton, whom I love, in preparation for working on the Gotthelf to get some nineteenth century—pseudo-nineteenth century—style because that’s how her book, Brookland, is written, but that’s a made-up language in the way George Saunders, whom I also love to read, writes, a kind of a made-up language. I love reading Chris Adrian, I think he’s wonderful. I was so thrilled we were able to have him come to the festival. He just happened to be in New York and therefore affordable for us. We didn’t have the budget to fly in people, so we had to use local people. He’s usually not local, but this year he was local, hurray! He’s a stunningly beautiful prose writer. Shelly Hazard blows my mind. She the most amazing prose stylist I’ve ever read. 

Before signing off, are there any other tips you would like to give to aspiring translators? 

Question every sentence and read everything out loud. Give time such that you can set things aside and not read them or look at them for a couple of weeks, and then you can return to them and have a fresh eye. You can look at it as if it’s new to you, because the point in translating is to arrive where you forget what the original said so that you can just deal with the English language text in its own way. It doesn’t get to be: It’s not okay to accept something that sounds wrong in English just because it’s “what the German says” or “what the French says.” So it’s really, really difficult to be as hard on yourself as a translator versus on yourself as a writer, but that’s where really good translations come from, compared to a mediocre one. The writing has that same attention, same polish, same detail, and don’t be afraid to write while you’re translating because all interesting writing is a little quirky in its use of language. We forget that we can do that, too, when we’re translating, but you must. No dead language. It’s not a dictionary exercise. It’s a writing exercise. End of preaching.

Laura Brown is the Associate Editor of fwriction : review, focused primarily on poetry and translations. A graduate student in literature at NYU, Brown spends twenty-eight hours a day with Thomas Bernhard, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, and other brilliant writers. She often sings in German, and in addition to a keen editorial eye, Brown paints in her spare time. She currently serves as an intern for New Directions.

Author and acclaimed translator Susan Bernofsky, Chair of the PEN Translation Committee, has translated eighteen books, including six by the great Swiss-German modernist writer Robert Walser, as well as novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori and others. She received the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Hermann Hesse Translation Prize as well as awards and fellowships from the NEH, the NEA, the PEN Translation Fund, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. She teaches in the MFA program at Queens College (CUNY) and blogs about translation at www.translationista.org.