By: Logan Adams
MFA Creative Writing & Environment, Iowa State University

Born in Springfield, Missouri, Mr. Daniel Woodrell passed through the Marines, the University of Kansas, the Writer’s Workshop, and a Michener Fellowship, ultimately settling with his wife, novelist Katie Estill, in West Plains, in the Ozarks, the setting for so much of his fiction, a place called the “least governable region in America.”

The Chicago Tribune’s review of Winter’s Bone described the prose as, “sentences that could be ancient carvings on a tree.”  Not some petunia-ringed slab of granite on Park Avenue or even Latin scrawl on the Declaration of Independence’s backside.  From his debut novel Under the Bright Lights, Mr. Woodrell rejected big city fiction and the stories of the landed class, a tradition he continues up to his most recent story collection, The Outlaw Album.

His writing is beautiful and sharp and lean with lines that snapped across my chest like the restraints on some demented log ride and then I was off, holding my breath at the sights, ready to take up arms with characters if called upon, lulled into contemplation by the moments just before the next swoop, eventually coming out on the other side knowing I was witness to something great.  Literary fiction without being about people who read literary fiction.

There’s this immense importance in Mr. Woodrell’s work, because it forces the acknowledgement that the lives in his stories, while fiction, are very true.  He gives these people, these Americans, a microphone and it’s our fortune to hear them, to see them struggle with getting it right.

What this all comes down to: The Dollys, the Shades, the addicts, and the Southern bushwackers—the outliers—can trust their stories are done justice when told by their bard.

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Logan Adams: Starting out with themes in your work—I’ve read some interviews where you bristle at people describing your work as “dark.”  Or maybe not bristle, but disagree with it.  Where do you think that misunderstanding comes from?

Daniel Woodrell: Well, I think I know in my own heart what I think I’m trying to say, and I think of my writing as having little sun breaks in it and so forth, but you really can’t argue if readers don’t see it.  I realize it and I’ve usually expressed that sentiment in a kind of baffled or bemused way more than an argumentative way.  I recognize it, and my wife also calls me dark.  [laughter]  And my editor would as well, so I just don’t think my books are negative, I don’t think they’re defeatist.  And I also think that one reason people think they’re dark is because they have negative endings.  But not all of them do.  You know, you have to make choices as you go through life and I think it’s just as useful a moral lesson to see what happens when you consistently make the wrong choices to show someone virtue triumphs.  So to me it’s moral.

LA: You once called “dark” as like life, life is dark.  That made a lot of sense to me.

DW: We can’t live in a cotton candy world where we’re not willing to recognize death—friends that have died, relatives are going to die, things are going to go wrong, jobs can be lost, houses are foreclosed.  You may have to save yourself a few times along the course of your life and all these challenges are things I think you need to be prepared for spiritually, not thinking that you’re somehow going to be the one to avoid that all.

LA: Your family comes from the Ozarks and some are originally of French descent, and that’s where The Bayou Trilogy’s setting came from.  You’ve been determined to give people who are now your neighbors in the Ozarks a voice.  Why do you focus on the Ozarks and do you see your motivations for using a certain setting in other authors?

DW: I’m a huge fan of Faulkner of course, but also William Kennedy’s Albany books.  Especially the first half dozen.  Because in his own voice—and he probably had a lot of influence on my style—I was apeshit for Kennedy at one point.  [laughter]  Who had thought of the spiritual life of Albany before he started doing it?  I’d never read a book set in Albany.  I did not have this plan when I started.  I wrote Give Us a Kiss and it was kind of rolicky and I thought, okay I got that out and had fun with it.  I did not realize I would just continue down the path, and as I did I began to realize, this is your inheritance, this is your legacy.  I think a lot about where the people who settled the Ozarks, where they came from before then, in the United States and from abroad and think, yeah there’s a story that needs to be told.  Aimee [Nezhukumatathil] said, if I don’t say it, who’s going to say it?  I’ve said that many times about the things I write about and the things I hope to write about.  If I don’t tell it, who’s going to tell it?  There’s a French director I like a lot and one of his sayings is, make visible that which without you might never be seen.  I consider that a pretty good credo for approaching what I want to do.

LA: You just referenced Aimee on the panel and you both talked about the ethical obligations you both feel when writing about a place.  What obligations do you have to the people you write about, if any?

DW: To tell an honest story and to give it all you got.  I’ve had some complete books, I could’ve published them, but I didn’t.  I just threw them away, because I said it’s a disservice to the overall thing you’re trying to carry—to have an effort that you yourself don’t feel measures up.  I don’t think writers have to have that.  I’ve heard writers, Barry Hannah and others say, you have no requirement to do that.  If you want to do that it’s a good source of energy and drive to do your writing.  I definitely started out as a lefty—I had no politics when I went in the military, shortly after that I had all kinds of politics.  So I’ve always seen writing about poor people and stressful economic circumstances as having a vaguely political underpinning.  Anytime you show impoverished people as full humans, even if they’re horribly flawed humans, there’s a political component.  I’ve always felt this was a way for me to express myself about these people and to quietly have a political—not a Danny political platform—just a human thing.  And it’s also quietly a Christian thing, you know?  [laughter]  Most people don’t think that, but it is.

LA: I was going to ask you what your role as a writer is, but it sounds like you hit on it right now.  Is that what you see your role being?

DW: That’s the one I’ve chosen to adopt.

LA:  How does your new collection, The Outlaw Album, fit into that role or that obligation toward the people of the Ozarks?

DW: Well the stories are very stark and dark, but I was thinking in terms of murder ballads, hill country ballads, British Isles ballads, and folklore.  And there’s a Russian woman I like a lot—she didn’t really influence the writing of anything—but I’ve started reading her since I was done with this thing.  Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.  She writes little, short gnomic things that have a macabre air to them.  A couple of them have been in the New Yorker, I think.  And that informed this collection.  And also certain kinds of things—the story I’m going to read tonight, at the end of the reading.  For a long time I thought it was going to be a novel, then I actually realized it’s not going to be a novel, at least not now.  And realized it could say most of what I wanted to say in a short story.  So some of them came about that way.

LA: You spoke earlier about politics.  You write a lot about class.  There are great illustrations of Rene Shade being caught between classes in The Bayou Trilogy and you said Tomato Red was influenced by newspaper articles of lower class whites being killed and police not doing anything.

DW: A gay man was one of them, too.  And still not solved.

LA: Has anyone been added to these outlier groups in the last five years?  Maybe framing this around your family from the Ozarks as being an example of social mobility over time.

DW: That’s what my new novel’s really about.  It looks like it’s about something else, but really it’s about how it took turmoil and heartbreak and tragedy to spring them forward, so to speak.  And I’m very excited about going to that road and I’m probably going to do it for a couple books, I think.

LA: Focusing on the social mobility?

DW: Well, yes.  One of the things I think about—I’m going to call it “working class,” although my grandmother who worked and everything, was probably more impoverished than certainly a plumber or something like that.  And then with my father we could say we had a working class household and neighborhood, but he did wear a white shirt to work because he was a salesman.  One of the things about moving up, my mother pushed us, she really pushed us to climb, and one brother did not, he did some time and some stuff and the other brother is an unusually successful businessman.  But as you move up and out of the class you were born into, you were comfortable with, you do leave something behind.  And Americans don’t like to acknowledge that that is part of the deal.  And some of it’s good and some are the things you value that you also leave behind.  There are a lot English writers who write about it very well—Allen Sillitoe and David Storey and those guys.  It’s kind of the thing, especially if you were upper middle class to begin with that you wouldn’t recognize—why would anybody feel a kind of sadness or loss to move out of a 600 square foot box with six people in it.  But you did.  I felt a tremendous confusion when my dad finally graduated college and got promoted and suddenly we weren’t living in the old neighborhood anymore.  We didn’t move up that far, but we did move out of there.  I think part of that is why I write so much about what I write about in my books is to recapture some of those feelings, that sense of neighborhood that which, even though it had all kinds of things wrong with it, you belonged, you felt completely at home there.  None of us were rich and few of us were incredibly poor—we were somewhere in that working range.

LA: The code that Rene [Shade] struggles with—the wonderful scenes in Tip’s bar where there are all these people sitting around thinking, oh, there’s the cop coming in.  Yet he feels a connection to those people.  He feels a part of Frogtown, but other people see him as the law and Tip has this ambivalent feeling toward him, especially in the beginning of The Bayou Trilogy, though it does evolve.  We see a similar kind of code that comes from a lack of interaction or suspicion toward the outside world in Winter’s Bone, as well as in a lot of your other work, but particularly with the Dollys.  It’s really their code that allows that novel to happen.  What is the importance of these codes and how do you try to capture them and use them in your work?

DW: Those codes make a lot of practical sense for those people choosing to lead that way of life.  The Scots and Irish were suspicious people when they first settled the Ozarks.  They didn’t want any sheriffs or anything.  They wanted no government.  That’s part of why the Ozarks developed the way it did.  It has been called the least governable section in America.  And not too long ago.  They didn’t want any of them and that’s why they left Kentucky and said let’s go where there is no civilization and we’ll just live there.  We won’t have order imposed because their experience with that world had been where order was governed by who had the gold and they didn’t have the gold.  They had religious principles, which I could have gotten into today a little bit, where your rightness with God was important, your material standing wasn’t.  It wasn’t laziness or anything—they didn’t see to pursing to every stinking dollar that’s available and that’s not necessarily what their God, as they understand him, would want.

LA: How do you set up your protagonists to navigate through this world?  Like Ree [Dolly]?  How important is the internal struggle of your characters?  Is this where your stories begin?  Is this what you’re trying to capture?

DW: I think it’s something more interior than that that’s not completely articulate to me.  But just as your speaking I realize that with Ree and Rene they have that same thing in common.  She’s part of a world she’s fairly ambivalent about and he’s a part of a world and he’s ambivalent in both directions.  What I wanted and one thing I think people like about Winter’s Bone is that it’s a story about a family with a code.  Might not be your code, but it’s a code.  A conservative writer who wrote a review about the book, he said, look, these people have a set of beliefs.  They’re not without beliefs.  It’s not your beliefs.  It’s not what you want to encourage, but they do have them.  It is a culture.  It is a community.  I think that’s one of the things people secretly respond to is that there’s this idea of being in a family where we understand a code and we have this bond with each other and that won’t be broken easily.

LA: I want to loop back to something you said on the panel that I haven’t read about you saying before.  You said you have a triple or quadruple vision of the Ozarks, so like in Winter’s Bone, I wonder how much of this is why you pick up this “dark” label.  Particularly when these places are haunted.  Maybe that’s coming through in this triple or quadruple vision.  Like those contemplative moments where Ree’s reflecting on the stone fences and the ghosts of pioneers.

DW: When I occasionally get the feeling like I need to be somewhere else, I’ll tell my wife, look, I know my family’s stories, there’s a lot to feel good about, there’s a lot not to feel good about.  There was a lot of pain and poverty and uncles dying because they couldn’t buy medicine and all kinds of Grapes of Wrath kind of thing.  Those all happen there, too, and I said, I walked through this and it ain’t all hearts and flowers, I’m aware of that, too.  That’s all hanging there, too.  So that’s part of the legacy, also, this long struggle and not always triumphant.  Both sides of my family are from there and my mother’s family did substantially better than my father’s family—not hugely, but notably.  Their history’s full of murders and stabbings and one of them was a lawyer and one was a doctor and don’t get crossways with those guys.  [laughter]  And I said, I always find that kind of strange.  My father’s family was always in hard times, but there’s no known violence associated with them.  My mother’s family—her great-grandfather, I guess—was sheriff and his sons were raised comfortably on 1,500 acres and they lost it eventually, but one of them—and I use this in the book, it’s from family legacy—killed a guy in public and had to pay everybody.  But they’re full of violence.  Just full of violence.  It’s as if they had plenty and they just wanted more.  So, my dad I don’t think you could get him to shoot you—maybe if you attacked him. [laughter]  Whereas these guys who had plenty—and that’s one of these oddities of life, I guess.

LA: You’ve talked about spirituality as being this next outlier category you’re thinking about and I’ve heard you talk about some of the groups who have organized in the Ozarks because of this lack of nosiness, I suppose.

DW: Many of these counties are sparsely populated.  My county’s probably the most populous, but some of them are under 6,000 residents.

LA: So where do you think this is taking you?

DW: It’s going to take some development, because I’m not completely conversant with that approach to life.  The deeply spiritual, whether it’s a strange spirituality or not or devotion to a set of afterlife beliefs and everything else.  But I think that’s going to be a slow development.  I realized since just before I wrote Winter’s Bone that I was getting interested in this idea, because I’m aware of how the Catholic church co-opted a lot of pagan rites and adapted them.  I find that fascinating in and of itself.  That’s how some things got there because the pagans weren’t going to give them up.  [laughter]  And as I was saying earlier, I started getting into some of these unusual sects that exist throughout the Ozarks and I wonder how long they’ve existed.  They may go back to that revival in the early 1800s, I don’t know.  I’d sure be curious to find out.  It won’t be easy to.  I’m not great about talking to that crowd.  First off you almost have to declare yourself devoted to them to get a conversation, but I’m ready to poke around and ask some questions to see what I can find out, because I find it very, very interesting.  Even the crazy Phelps group we were talking about from Topeka—hateful, hateful people—they are rock solid.  They have a hard set of rules.  I saw a documentary about them and they excommunicate people for practically nothing.

LA: Was that the one with the British journalist?

DW: Yeah.  Doesn’t take much to get them to kick you out.  [laughter]

LA: Have a strict code, I suppose.  [laughter]

DW: Yeah, and you’re dead to them—son, daughter—once you’re out.  That’s a strange thing.  I found myself in a long conversation about the founding of Mormonism last week.  They had a guy that killed enemies of the church and there’s been books written about him.  And then I thought, well I don’t know, but then I thought, who are you kidding, what do you think the Knight Templar were?  [laughter]  At some remove the Presbyterians probably had one and the leftists.  [laughter]  It maybe have been some centuries ago.  [laughter]  And as Oral Hershiser said when he was criticized—he was the Tim Tebow of his day—Christian doesn’t mean wimp, people.  [laughter]

LA: Well thank you very much.

DW: No problem, thank you.

 

Last week, we posted Part 1 of Flyway’s interview with Anthony Doerr. Below, Flyway’s nonfiction editor, Lindsay Tigue, asks one of her favorite writers about research, authenticity, short-story length, and more.

LT: In an interview with Christopher Mohar for Fiction Writers Review, you said about research, “I very much use writing as an excuse to research, and research as an excuse to procrastinate. The world is so fundamentally interesting and it makes me fall in love with it a dozen times a day.” How much research goes into a typical story, or novel, and what types of “sources” do you seek out?

AD: Right. Lindsay, do you do research for your work?

LT: I love research.

AD: Yeah, I love it, too. Often, my students kind of groan when I say, “Let’s talk about research.” They say, “We got into creative writing so we can make shit up!” But yes, for me, it really is an excuse to learn more about the world, to find some subject, whether it’s poisonous snails or sturgeon or the early construction of radios. In “The Hunter’s Wife,” I just got interested in hibernation, how animals’ heart rate slows way down. Do you call that dreaming? Do you even call that life? There’s this huge gray area between life and death. So often, I start by reading a lot about a subject with no real idea of how to build narrative up out of it except that I’m very interested in it. I think that’s the key for young writers—of whatever age, but young in their career—is to find those things that you’re vitally interested in, even if you don’t want to, or are unable to articulate why you’re interested in those things. Whether it’s violin-making or horse racing, or how dry cleaners work—the more you learn about it the more you realize, first, how ignorant you are and second, how interesting it is. Like that incinerator you showed me yesterday; I’ve never even really thought about an incinerator, what a job in an incinerator would be like. And how maybe in there, there’s some engineer who is probably really passionate about making garbage burning more efficient. And maybe there isn’t necessarily a story in that and you’ve spent a day learning about something you won’t be able to build characters out of.

LT: But you’ve still learned something.

AD: Totally. In terms of a vehicle, the Internet is an incredible tool for procrastination, but it’s still an amazing tool for research—particularly for images. And you’re right, by the way, there’s a lot more research in a novel. Certainly, the longer the work, the more research there is, but being able to look at images, especially historical images in twelve seconds, it’s unparalleled. We have access to information like no humans have had before us.

LT: And videos, too.

AD: And videos, no question. For me, it helps looking at something like a Sears, Roebuck catalog from 1940. You can look at that stuff almost immediately. Maps, even Google Earth is sort of an incredible tool for writers.

LT: Sure, like do you turn left or right at this street?

AD: I do try to alienate the fewest number of readers possible, so I do try and get the streets right, the intersections right, even bus routes. I remember in my novel, I went back to Anchorage just to make sure that this character Winkler was riding the right buses at the right time. Some of that can qualify as procrastination, but you never know what you’re going to learn when you do that.

LT: You just want to make the true true.

AD: Exactly.

LT: In that same interview, you said your “work comes from hundreds or thousands of hours of working through things, from pouring lots and lots of observation and thought into every paragraph, every dead-end, every false start.” I was just wondering, how long do you typically spend on a short story, for instance? A lot of your stories are quite long.

AD: Yeah, the stories themselves are long. I don’t necessarily think of myself as a particularly slow writer, but I work a lot more than some of my friends do (laughs). I’m jealous of poets who are like, “My work day’s done; it’s 9:45a.m.!” I mean that in a funny way, not to dismiss the work they do.

The story, “Memory Wall”—which maybe is a novella—that took me around seven months of straight work. I had had knee surgery at the time and some of those days were ten-hour days where I wasn’t doing much else. So yes, lots of hours.

LT: Do they vary—do some stories come together more quickly than others?

AD: Very occasionally. If I’m being really playful and I don’t feel like it’s going into a book, I can write a story in maybe two or three weeks. But those are typically two or three-thousand word pieces. Very, very rarely does it go that quickly. Even essays. Even book reviews. Book reviews end up taking me a whole week usually. A little essay for the New York Times that’s around eight hundred words—I’ll agree to do it because I’ll think, “Oh I can write that this weekend,” but it ends up taking me probably six days of work to do it.

I revise all the time. I’m just always reading through what I have and trying to make it better, and more musical, and cleaner. More true.

LT: Are you typically working on several projects at the same time or do you like to focus on one?

AD: Usually multiple projects. It depends what sort of deadlines I’m under. This novel is probably now seven years in the making and I’ve written two whole books in between and lots and lots of different essays and magazine pieces. I think, eventually, to be a professional writer, you have to be able to juggle small and large-scale projects all at once. I like that today, maybe I’ll spend two hours on this and tomorrow, I’m in Iowa so who knows what I’ll get to? How about you?

LT: I’m mostly just working on short stories and poems right now.

AD: But one at a time?

LT: Yes, but I know I need to shift away from that.

AD: No, not necessarily. So you’ll have a story and you’ll finish it before you’ll start even a poem?

LT: No, not with poetry, but I usually focus on one story that I’m really in because I have trouble breaking away from that cast of characters to work on another.

AD: Yeah, that’s good. If you’re feeling the energy for any project you’re in, I think you just need to pursue that. That will change a little bit as you get toward your thesis and you start thinking about a book-length project. For me, it’s like once you start understanding what might fit between the covers of this book, you start trying to tailor everything so that it will all kind of mesh.

LT: So, for Memory Wall, did you know you wanted this thread of memory and time to appear throughout?

AD: I did, but it didn’t come until later. I had finished “Village 113” and I had finished “Procreate, Generate” and, I started to think—I was about halfway through “Memory Wall”—“If I start building a whole book out of this, how can I engineer all of these things to work in harmony?” In some ways a writer can be lucky because your fascinations align themselves subconsciously, so that it might still fit inside a book. But then, I started to try to overtly and consciously manipulate these stories so that they all revolved around similar questions. It began to feel as though memory was like a courtyard, and the stories all were windows, different kind of windows, into the same courtyard.

LT: And with The Shell Collector, was it the same process, or was that different?

AD: Similar. I started some of those stories in graduate school and, after leaving, I tried to recognize which stories were weaker and pull those out and write stronger ones. You do start to ask yourself, as you generate new stories: How will this complement the other, already-completed pieces in the collection? That’s something I think about a lot. I think e-readers might eventually demolish the collection the way iTunes has demolished the album, but right now I do love the idea of Dubliners or Winesburg, Ohio, any book that is a collection, where it’s an experience to read each story in succession.

LT: They accumulate in a way.

AD: Yeah, yeah. That’s a great verb for it.

 

LT: This is the typical interview question, but I was wondering what writers have influenced you? What contemporary writers are you excited about right now?

AD: No, that’s a good question. What contemporary writers are you excited about?

LT: Well, I really like Jim Shepard.

AD: I love Jim. There’s a researcher.

LT: In Ben Percy’s class, we also just read Lauren Groff’s collection Delicate, Edible, Birds and I really liked that a lot. I’ve been reading a lot of debut collections, I suppose. I really liked Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.

AD: Oh yeah, that’s great. She’s reaching readers. That’s exciting.

Let me see, living writers? I’m still kind of in love with Ondaatje. He has a new book that came out last year, The Cat’s Table. It’s beautiful; it just kind of fills you with hope that you can still be generating excellent work into your seventies.

I’m reading a book right now called Solo by Rana DasGupta. It’s gorgeous. Man, it’s really gorgeous. Really, it’s the whole twentieth century distilled inside one 100-year-old man’s life. He’s gone blind now and a huge proportion of it is threaded through memories, which I suppose makes sense for me, that I would like it. But it’s also got tons of chemistry in it and the second half is more of him thinking about these children he never had moving out into the world and imagining their lives. And you think that would be really nebulous, but it’s really beautiful writing.

Sebald—he’s dead, so it may not fit your question, but still a contemporary writer. Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, which is such a beautiful book. In terms of the musicality of his language and blending this kind of curiosity and memory and imagination, those are things that have taught me so much just by reading him.

Andrea Barrett. She’s another writer who uses research really well and who really taught me how to use science, that you can be interested in science and write stories about it, that the science building and the English building don’t have to be four miles apart on campus. You can lead a life in which you’re interested in both things. She has been a real model to me.

LT: I think you’ve said before that you were really influenced by Alice Munro, too.

AD: Yes. Especially when I was younger. In my early twenties, I started reading her and it was a weird thing to be a young man in his twenties and reading the kind of fiction that my mom would read, because it was often about the lives of women, older women in Canada. She has this reputation of being the classic living short story writer, but for me she was really experimental in the way she used time, really disruptive of the Ray Carver, Tobias Wolff stories that we had been reading and those the New Yorker was publishing. They were stories I loved also, but that often just took place in the course of one drive, one conversation, or one afternoon. I loved that Alice would try to encompass whole lives. Often she’d show this really important and powerful understanding of time, in terms of geologic time. That’s something I’m always trying to work with, you know, suggest that the lives of your characters are quite small in terms of the life of the place that they’re in without being preachy or making your work too sciencey so that readers fall out of it.

Moby Dick, too. Moby Dick has been so important to me because there are all these chapters that are like: Here are how harpoons are made. My students usually say, “This is so boring!” but I like the idea that you can write this ripping, playful yarn and still teach your reader practical things about the world.

LT: This is related to my next questions. You write about science books for the Boston Globe. Have you always been interested in science? Have any of the topics you’ve written about served as inspiration for stories?

AD: Yes. My mom was a science teacher and my oldest brother is a very accomplished optics scientist. So we were just surrounded by science. Growing up, our shelves were full of Aldo Leopold. The most literary books were Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard and even Rick Bass as I got older. I’ve just always been interested in the natural world and being outside and trying to understand it as a naturalist might.

And yeah, the column has fed my fiction in lots of different ways. The story, “Memory Wall,” the central conceit of it—which I didn’t arrive at until about halfway through—that memories could be harvested and stored, came out of a book I reviewed for the Globe. A neuroscientist was suggesting that that may be possible in the near future. Even then, I was like, “Really, should I try this? It seems so science fiction.” I read a lot of books about fossils, too. I read first about the gorgon in a book for the Boston Globe, this fossil that the characters are looking for in “Memory Wall.”

LT: That’s great that your research is kind of built into your career.

AD: It is. It’s great. Even if nine of the ten books I read don’t necessarily filter into my fiction. The other nice thing about the column is that I get twenty books every month all about the latest issues in science in the mail. So it’s almost just the perfect job to keep your fiction growing. You always have more than you could possibly read anyway.

LT: So, at Flyway we’re concerned with environment and place in writing, and we kind of talked about the different settings for your stories, but I’m wondering, where does place come in your process, do you start with that first or do you start with a character?

AD: Surprisingly not always first. It’s not always like, “Okay, I’m going to set a story in Tanzania and I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen.” Often, you have a character’s desire for something, or just some curiosity like we mentioned for a venomous snail, and then you start threading and spiraling different conflicts out of it and occasionally the whole thing will pivot to a different place maybe two months into the process. But you do need to obviously settle on your place before you’re, say, a fifth of the way through a story (laughs).

LT: The MFA program here at Iowa State has a focus on environment, which allows students to explore interdisciplinary subjects relating to environmental subjects. We also read “environmental” writers in some classes and I was wondering how you would define an environmental writer, what that term really means to you?

AD: I don’t know how I would describe an environmental writer. I think it’s so important to understand where the comforts in your life come from and the costs that they have and how remote those things can be—you know, that your bowl of cereal did not just materialize and that the heat coming out of your furnace registers is fuel that is burning somewhere. That it’s our responsibility, not to feel guilty necessarily, but to try to comprehend our lives in context both with what the world’s going to look like in fifty years and what it looked like fifty years ago. I think storytelling can help do that.

I think there is room for morality in fiction writing and that’s something I grapple with all the time. I get frustrated when people say American writers are apolitical and American writers aren’t taking on moral issues the way writers of other nationalities might because I feel like that’s something I’m very concerned with, trying to display characters’ lives in the context of their times and maybe not judge them, but to just ask the reader questions about things like the Three Gorges Dam for example, in the story “Village 113.”  What does that thing mean to those villagers? Not to condemn it, but to show that it’s erasing centuries and centuries of history and question if progress is something that we should be worshipping all the time?

LT: My last question: What is your favorite animal?

AD: My favorite animal. What I want to say is dog because I just love dogs, but that’s a little easy. Lately, I’ve been really interested in watching herons. You always think they’re very regal and grand, but when you start looking at them really closely they’re always kind of tattered and often they’ve got mud and snails on their feathers and they’re always probing around in mucky places. I think of them as deposed kings. Like tattered old royals who have gotten dirty somehow. I love their patience. They’re such a good lesson in patience. They can just stand there waiting, waiting, waiting for a riffle, looking for some little minnow to come past. There’s something amazing about that. I so rarely even eat without reading or doing something else that to think that eating is all you do. All day, this one thing, this one great project: feeding yourself. It’s a good reminder that we don’t always have to be rushing around.

 

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In late February, Anthony Doerr came to Iowa State’s 8th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness, and the Creative Imagination. Doerr read from his newest collection Memory Wall. He is also the author of three other books: the story collection The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the nonfiction account Four Seasons in Rome.

Anthony Doerr devotes his writing to the physical world and the miracles it provides. His nuanced observation deals in fascination—his characters’ obsessions become real in the worlds he constructs. Doerr’s writing spans times, examines memory, and takes on vastly different personae, but always, it inhabits an intense curiosity.

Doerr has received numerous prizes and accolades for his writing. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. He won the 2010 Story Prize and the Rome Prize, and received the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.

Flyway blogger and Assistant Nonfiction Editor, Lindsay Tigue, spoke with Anthony Doerr about topics ranging from his writing process, to importance of place, and the possibilities of research.

Lindsay Tigue: Your stories are set all over the globe from the Lamu Archipelago in “The Shell Collector,” Lithuania in “The River Nemunas,” to Tanzania in “Mkondo.” What draws you to writing about such diverse places, and would you say you are more interested in writing about the unfamiliar place as opposed to someplace closer to home? Or is it an equal fascination?

Anthony Doerr: That’s a good way to feed me the answer (laughs). I think I am more interested in the unfamiliar. All of my work has to do with disrupting habitual patterns, whether it’s at the sentence level in terms of disrupting cliché, or in the shapes of stories in terms of resisting easy structures, or in terms of place. I suppose I could read a great story about a bald guy who shops at the supermarket in Idaho, but that’s not the sort of story I want to write.  I’m drawn to reading because I want to learn about lives that are different than mine. Then you can also, of course, trace all sorts of commonalities between those lives and my own.

You know, when you read, more so than any other art form, you occupy the mind of somebody else and that’s what got me addicted to reading and writing. I’m drawn to different settings because I like to leave the familiar, no question. I think it’s easy to say, “Oh, they’re exotic,” and that kind of belittles the effort.

For me, I’m interested in transporting, too, in the way you disappear into books as a child. That’s what I want my stories to be—a place a reader can disappear into. And that hopefully they’re made carefully enough and plausibly enough that a reader will believe he or she is in this other world. Even if it’s not exactly an accurate, realistic version of Tanzania or Lithuania.  It’s as much a product of the imagination and research as time spent there.

LT: So have you been to all of the places that you write about?

AD: I have been to just about all of them. In my very first book, The Shell Collector, there’s a story called, “The Caretaker,” and the first twelve pages are in Liberia and I had never been there. In this most recent collection, Memory Wall, there’s a story called “Village 113” and I had been to Hong Kong, but I had never been to mainland China and the whole story is set along the Yangtze. So that’s probably the two examples of places I hadn’t been.

Already when you’re writing about a place you’ve only spent a month in or something, you’re a little bit nervous. I get pretty anxious when I’m setting something entirely in a place I haven’t been. In some ways, you’re liberated because the real world is so real and it fills you with detail that can often be extraneous. If you want to go write about New York City and you go stand in Union Square for a day, you’ll get so much detail that really doesn’t necessarily belong in a piece of writing where you’re trying to convey a certain mood or atmosphere or motivation.

LT: But it fascinates you so much that it’s hard to let go of, even if it doesn’t belong?

AD: Totally. Exactly. I keep a journal and anytime I’m anywhere—right now, for example, I’m only in Iowa for forty hours—I’ll make as many entries as I can.  I never know what I might see here that maybe five years from now I can thread back into a story. I’m always looking at the journal as raw material for something that I might need someday.

LT: It seems many of your characters have a particular skill or a very focused fascination like the blind conchologist’s ability to identify cone shells, or the hunter’s wife’s ability to see the whole life of a person or animal through touch. So, I was wondering what draws you to characters with rare, or even supernatural gifts?

AD: In some ways that’s two separate questions. A lot of my characters do have specific real-world passions. In the novel I’ve been working on for a while, this boy is in love with radios and loves to build and tinker around with radios. But you’re right, other elements of my stories are supernatural and I get that question all the time and I never have a good answer for it. I don’t think of myself as a mystical person. I wrote a whole novel (About Grace) about a guy whose dreams occasionally predict the future, but I don’t necessarily believe such a thing is actually possible. And the letters I get from readers—

LT: Oh gosh, I bet.

AD: (laughs) They’re like, “That happens to me!” I don’t necessarily believe in any of that stuff. In fact, I’m very skeptical of it. But I do love how supernatural events challenge people’s ability to believe. I mean, lots and lots of people right around us in this hotel lobby believe that two thousand years ago a dude was nailed to a cross and then put in a hole or a cave and got up three days later and walked around healing people. That is something that they build into part of every single day they’re on Earth.

LT: Without even thinking about it.

AD: Sometimes without recognizing the absurdity of it. But also, it’s kind of sweet and wonderful.

To a much sillier degree, I’m basically lying to my kids right now because they’re losing their teeth. They put a little piece of skeleton under their pillow and they honestly think that some little winged creature wants to give them money for that stuff (laughs).

LT: And it’s so lovely that they think that.

AD: Right. There’s something wonderful about it. I certainly don’t want to be the one to set them straight on the tooth fairy. Let the rest of the world destroy their innocence.

So you know, I am just interested in this type of belief. I’m trying not to make any judgments about it. I’m interested in putting characters in situations where everything they think is real falls into question in some way and they’re challenged. In “The River Nemunas,” which is not necessarily a supernatural story, I ask the reader and my character to consider: What if there was one last sturgeon in this river? What if they’re not all gone? Some people say that story is about faith and God and maybe that’s true; it was unintentional, or if it was, it was very subconscious. I just wanted to challenge the grandfather who thought he knew what his life was, what this river was, and to show him something that maybe upset his understanding of it. Or opened it up.

LT: In an interview with Christopher Mohar for Fiction Writers Review, you said about research, “I very much use writing as an excuse to research, and research as an excuse to procrastinate. The world is so fundamentally interesting and it makes me fall in love with it a dozen times a day.” How much research goes into a typical story, or novel, and what types of “sources” do you seek out?

AD: Right. Lindsay, do you do research for your work?

LT: I love research.

AD: Yeah, I love it, too. Often, my students kind of groan when I say, “Let’s talk about research.” They say, “We got into creative writing so we can make shit up!” But yes, for me, it really is an excuse to learn more about the world, to find some subject, whether it’s poisonous snails or sturgeon or the early construction of radios. In “The Hunter’s Wife,” I just got interested in hibernation, how animals’ heart rate slows way down. Do you call that dreaming? Do you even call that life? There’s this huge gray area between life and death. So often, I start by reading a lot about a subject with no real idea of how to build narrative up out of it except that I’m very interested in it. I think that’s the key for young writers—of whatever age, but young in their career—is to find those things that you’re vitally interested in, even if you don’t want to, or are unable to articulate why you’re interested in those things. Whether it’s violin-making or horse racing, or how dry cleaners work—the more you learn about it the more you realize, first, how ignorant you are and second, how interesting it is. Like that incinerator you showed me yesterday; I’ve never even really thought about an incinerator, what a job in an incinerator would be like. And how maybe in there, there’s some engineer who is probably really passionate about making garbage burning more efficient. And maybe there isn’t necessarily a story in that and you’ve spent a day learning about something you won’t be able to build characters out of.

LT: But you’ve still learned something.

AD: Totally. In terms of a vehicle, the Internet is an incredible tool for procrastination, but it’s still an amazing tool for research—particularly for images. And you’re right, by the way, there’s a lot more research in a novel. Certainly, the longer the work, the more research there is, but being able to look at images, especially historical images in twelve seconds, it’s unparalleled. We have access to information like no humans have had before us.

LT: And videos, too.

AD: And videos, no question. For me, it helps looking at something like a Sears, Roebuck catalog from 1940. You can look at that stuff almost immediately. Maps, even Google Earth is sort of an incredible tool for writers.

LT: Sure, like do you turn left or right at this street?

AD: I do try to alienate the fewest number of readers possible, so I do try and get the streets right, the intersections right, even bus routes. I remember in my novel, I went back to Anchorage just to make sure that this character Winkler was riding the right buses at the right time. Some of that can qualify as procrastination, but you never know what you’re going to learn when you do that.

LT: You just want to make the true true.

AD: Exactly.

LT: In that same interview, you said your “work comes from hundreds or thousands of hours of working through things, from pouring lots and lots of observation and thought into every paragraph, every dead-end, every false start.” I was just wondering, how long do you typically spend on a short story, for instance? A lot of your stories are quite long.

AD: Yeah, the stories themselves are long. I don’t necessarily think of myself as a particularly slow writer, but I work a lot more than some of my friends do (laughs). I’m jealous of poets who are like, “My work day’s done; it’s 9:45a.m.!” I mean that in a funny way, not to dismiss the work they do.

The story, “Memory Wall”—which maybe is a novella—that took me around seven months of straight work. I had had knee surgery at the time and some of those days were ten-hour days where I wasn’t doing much else. So yes, lots of hours.

LT: Do they vary—do some stories come together more quickly than others?

AD: Very occasionally. If I’m being really playful and I don’t feel like it’s going into a book, I can write a story in maybe two or three weeks. But those are typically two or three-thousand word pieces. Very, very rarely does it go that quickly. Even essays. Even book reviews. Book reviews end up taking me a whole week usually. A little essay for the New York Times that’s around eight hundred words—I’ll agree to do it because I’ll think, “Oh I can write that this weekend,” but it ends up taking me probably six days of work to do it.

I revise all the time. I’m just always reading through what I have and trying to make it better, and more musical, and cleaner. More true.

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Check back soon for Part II!

Rhett Trull is the editor and founder of Cave Wall, a biannual print journal out of Greensboro, North Carolina. Flyway blogger Andrew Payton got the chance to ask Ms. Trull a few questions about her work.

Andrew Payton: What is the story behind Cave Wall? How did it start? What was the driving force?

Rhett Trull: My husband Jeff and I started Cave Wall five years ago in order to celebrate poems we love. I’ve been a collector of favorite poems my whole life and for years have kept notebooks and files of them, returning to them often. Also, I love literary journals. I’ve subscribed to many over the years and always wanted to start my own. When I met Jeff, someone else who appreciates journals and poetry, the timing was right and Cave Wall was born. Maybe it sounds kind of cheesy, but the driving force is love. When a poem excites me I want to shout it out to the whole world; I want everyone to experience it. Cave Wall is a way to try to share those poems with, if not the whole world, at least an enthusiastic, appreciative group of readers.

AP: Would you say that you have a particular aesthetic as an editor? What do you look for in a poem or poet?

RT: Whatever my editorial aesthetic is remains somewhat of a mystery to me, and I like it that way. My tastes in poetry are ever-changing. I try to be open to all styles, as do Jeff and our other main Cave Wall reader, Michael Boccardo. We like poems that are long, short, lyric, narrative, funny, sad, and everything in between, as long as they move us. I guess that’s what I’m looking for when I read through a stack of submissions: I want a poem to leave me somewhere different than it finds me. I want to be changed by a poem. Also, I’m looking for a voice, one that engages my attention in a way that makes me forget everything else but this poem in this moment.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed as I put together these issues is how each one ends up developing its own aesthetic; certain themes emerge and are echoed. Sometimes, at the end of a reading period, when we’re trying to figure out which poem out of twenty worthy poems gets the last slot in an issue, one of the deciding factors becomes which poem fits best with the others we’ve gathered.

AP: Your first collection of poetry, The Real Warnings, was published in 2009 by Anhinga Press. How does being a poet yourself inspire your work as an editor? Where do these two roles intersect?

RT: I think the main intersection between editing and writing, at least for me, has to do with an exchange of energy. Getting to spend the majority of my time bouncing between two types of work about which I’m passionate is a luxury I try not to take for granted. If the work on one gets frustrating, I turn to the other and am refreshed, renewed. Certainly, working on Cave Wall has improved my writing, as does any time spent reading and studying good poetry. Plus, spending time with poetry I love makes me a happier person, fills me with gratitude, and that good energy gets carried over into all other parts of my life. As for how being a poet might inspire my work as an editor, well, it helps me appreciate how much work goes into each line, each word, of each poem. I hope this appreciation comes out in my responses to submissions. We receive many strong poems and have room to publish just a few, but I try whenever possible to respond personally to those we don’t accept, pointing out something I liked about the poems, letting the poet know that I value the time I spent with their work.

AP: As I’ve said, I found the most recent issue of Cave Wall superb. As the magazine is not affiliated with a university, like many seem to be these days, how do you promote Cave Wall? Who are most of your readers? And do you hope to expand that base of readers?

RT: Thank you. Your enthusiasm about issue 10 makes me happy. And this interview will, I hope, bring a few more readers our way. Word of mouth and advertisements here and there are our main method of promoting Cave Wall, as well as venues like Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Luna Park Review, and New Pages. The editors of those sites are invaluable when it comes to letting readers know what’s going on in the world of small presses. It helps to win some awards recognition, too, and we’re thrilled that two poems from issue 7 were chosen by Kevin Young for the Best American Poetry that came out this fall. Our subscription numbers continue to climb each year, and yes, we want to keep that number growing. We try to expand our advertising a little every year. We go to AWP. Meanwhile, we try to keep the subscription cost low, knowing how many good journals are out there and how precious each dollar is these days.

AP: Cave Wall publishes exclusively in print and exclusively poetry. Is there any impetus to move some material online or to work in other genres?

RT: I love all genres, but Cave Wall is strictly a poetry and art journal. We like the size of it: just 72 pages each issue. And although we put a few poems from each issue online and may add some other digital supplemental features, Cave Wall will remain a print journal always. The simple reason is that I love books and don’t enjoy reading on a screen for long periods of time. We’re happy with Cave Wall just the way it is. Technology is exciting and fun to explore, but isn’t there something about print publications that ought to be celebrated and continued, too? I think so. I’m going to keep celebrating. I’m in love with books.

Our annual Notes from the Field contest is now open for submissions!  We’re looking for prose focusing on place and the environmental imagination.

Word Limit: 3,500 words

Prize: The winner will receive $200 and publication in Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment.
The first runner-up will receive $50 and publication consideration.

Reading Fee: $19 (includes a one-year subscription to Flyway)

Submissions should be submitted online by midnight on November 4th.

For details, see our contest page.

Still have questions?  Comment here and we’ll be sure to answer!