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Between the Lines |
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Interview with Mark Winegardner |
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That's True of Everybody
Mark Winegardner
Winegardner returns to the Midwest that he knows so intimately and casts a piercingly compassionate eye on its denizens who lead lives of not necessarily quiet desperation. The result is a kaleidoscopic picture of a people who are arrogant and humble, faithful and disloyal, driven and floundering—a people who are, finally, America itself.
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Biography |
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| Mark Winegardner, whose books include the bestselling Crooked River Burning, the award-winning The Veracruz Blues, and the cult favorite Prophet of the Sandlots, has also published in GQ, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, and several literary publications. Several of his short stories have been cited as Distinguished Stories in The Best American Short Stories. Winegardner is a board member of the Associated Writing Programs and the Burroway Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University. For more information on Mark Winegardner visit www.markwinegardner.com.
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Interview |
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Q: The stories in That's True of Everybody reveal personal aspects of characters which are, in general, "true of everybody." Are these personal secrets only secret because they are not shared publicly? In other words, only secret to the individual?
A: This is something that's true of any good story. Raymond Carver once said that short stories should tell us what everybody knows but what nobody is talking about—at least not publicly. I do think that for fiction to succeed it has to have a truth-telling component. There needs to be an element of saying what's impolite. You need to show aspects of the character that they'd gladly drown little baby kittens rather than be on display to the world. If you don't do that, I think you are either being less than honest about the characters you are writing about or you are writing about a line segment of those character's lives that's not the story.
I taught writing for a long time and I think one of the stumbling blocks people have when they first start to write is that they are too polite. They underestimate how complicated human beings are. They believe that art is nice or that it's subservient to the admirable politics of its creator. All thoughts that will just kill them as writers. One of the things I often tell students who are having a problem with this is, "Pay attention to your life for one day." It's impossible to go through one day of life during which you don't do a dozen things that, if you were stopped and asked to explain yourself, would leave you stammering and seeming like a crazy person. Any human being, monitored moment by moment and unaware of it, would commit dozens of completely insane acts. When writing fiction, some people think it is important to explain. But the impulse to explain is death to a fiction writer. As a writer you shouldn't try to explain your characters; they shouldn't be more explainable than yourself.
Q: Some of the best stories in this book are written from a female perspective. How do you manage to transfer your personal thoughts into that of the female psyche?
A: I love women, and I've spent a lot of time around them. I happen to be a heterosexual, and I've devoted a heck of a lot more time trying to figure out how women think than I have trying to figure out how men think. Maybe that pays off in my writing. But I also think that it's a practice that would benefit any writer-leaping far outside the sort of people you think you understand merely because they're "like you." Most of the time we overestimate the understanding we have for people like ourselves. The world is full of people who are walking around miserable because they don't understand themselves, and they're perfectly clear on that being the reason they're miserable. Yet when those same people turn to writing, they concentrate on characters who are vaguely like themselves. And they think they understand them. Ri-i-i-ght. Sure they do.
I write from a female perspective about as often as from a male perspective. When I first started out as a writer I was intimidated by the idea of writing from a female perspective. But, really, I think that people are more alike than different, and I realized that I wasn't going to grow very much as a writer if I started making arbitrary distinctions between people. If a person can't or won't write about people other than himself, he or she should give it up right now. If you write only about men if you're male, then that cuts off more than fifty percent of the population. Can you write only about Americans if you're an American? Can you write only about left-handed people if you're left-handed? Can you write only about hip-replacement surgery if you yourself have had it? Although gender is arguably the biggest of distinctions, scientists will tell you that it is really only a very small percentage of the total body composition. When you look at it this way, it's less intimidating.
I think one of the reasons I've been able to write at least reasonably well from the female perspective is that to me it's an opportunity to be somebody else. It frees me from being me—which, unless a person is an egomaniac, is great fun and a great relief. That said, without revealing or suggesting too much, I should probably also admit that several of my most autobiographical characters have been women. Flaubert famously said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!" which is a startling statement of course in that Madame Bovary didn't particularly resemble Flaubert in any way. But I understand what it means to have a character whose actions and circumstances are entirely unlike mine but whose emotional center is, for me, nakedly autobiographical. Writing about characters who on the surface are utterly different from me frees me to use personal experience in a way that transforms it. In The Veracruz Blues, the most autobiographical character, emotionally, is a seventy-something former Negro League baseball pitcher. Superficially, he's nothing like me.
Writing from a women's perspective isn't entirely autobiographical either, but I find that it helps me because I think more deeply about every aspect of the character. I'm very conscious about trying to inhabit this character so that it is not me-to the point that the character develops without conscious thought. Writing short stories is probably more like method acting than not. For me as a writer, a lot of what is exciting is the opportunity to get outside my own small life—to think meaningfully about what it's like to be someone else.
The famous writing advice that you should write what you know, makes a certain kind of sense, but I'm more of the mind that it's more interesting to write about what I'd like to know. I'm interested in looking at questions that I can't exactly answer and then writing, not so much for solving for x on those questions, but to understand them. If there is a right answer to it, then it isn't a good question to write about. "Why do people treat each other like this?" "How do people get away with this?" "Why are some people punished for behavior like this and others not?" There's never going to be a one sentence answer to these, but I try to inhabit the questions by writing stories that provide at least some sort of emotional understanding of them.
Q: Your writing style is reminiscent of a Dorothy Parker-Anais Nin combination—both female writers and both influential and respected for personal perspective-type writing. Have either or both of these women influenced you—or is there some other greater female influence?
A: Parker and Nin are writers I certainly have admiration for but they are not, to be frank, writers who directly influenced me. There is however a female writer who has directly influenced me and has taught me the most about what a short story can be, and that's Alice Munro. I think most people are going to look back at her work one or two hundred years from now and decide that she, more than any other short story writer who ever lived, expanded what was possible in the short story. It's a sort of truism that a lot of Munro's short stories have the scope of a novel in twenty to thirty-five pages. I admire that. I admire the richness and generosity of that style, and it's something that, though I wouldn't say I always tried to do, is generally important to me. There are several stories in the book where I am trying to give good value and trying to say, "Okay, I know you're busy and I'm going to write a novel about these characters in twenty to thirty pages. And it's going to have all the velocity and narrative drive of a story, but I'm going to try to give the breadth that you'd get from a nice little novel-all in a dense, really tight short story." It's no accident that in "Ace of Hearts" there is a character named Constance Monroe, an obvious tip of the hat to Munro. I think of that story as my thank you to Alice Munro and as my humble attempt to put into use all that she's taught me. There are other female writers who have also been influential to me: Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates. Many of my biggest literary heroes are female.
I came to Dorothy Parker's work fairly late. One thing I really like about her, and something that I think I do reasonably well in my stories, is her ability to be impolite. Unflinching. Dorothy Parker is not worried about being nice. People often say, "I like this character. I didn't like this character. I didn't like this book because that character was not likeable." If you pin readers down and start talking to them about their favorite books, what will immediately emerge is that a very high percentage of them feature memorable characters who were incredibly engrossing, but not necessarily likeable. Reader reactions are more about a character being engaging than likeable. When readers are unengaged by an unlikable character, sure, they hate the book. But when readers are engaged by an unlikable character, they'll probably love the story or novel for it. This is perhaps especially true in the last hundred years or so, which has kind of been an era of the antihero. This is seen in bold relief with contemporary retellings of older stories from the antihero's point of view. John Gardner's brilliant Grendel, for example. Or, recently, Gregory Maguire's Wicked, which retells The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. My favorite book to read to my kids is Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf.
Q: Let's talk for a moment about the story "Halftime." This is a story from a male perspective, and the protagonist is losing or has already lost his grip on reality—possibly due to a sleeping disorder. This story is different in that your style while telling it is from a more erratic or scattered character perspective than the focused character sketches of your other work. When did you write this particular story and what was your state of mind when you wrote it?
A: It's the newest story in the book, the last one I wrote before handing in the manuscript. The two newest stories are "Keegan's Load" and "Halftime," both of which were written after years of working on a nearly 600-page novel (Crooked River Burning). Getting back into the groove of writing stories again proved a little bit difficult, even though I was hungry to do it. You don't just create a novel of that scope and move merrily on to the next project. I guess you do if you're Joyce Carol Oates, but you don't if you're me. I had a two-year-old, my wife was pregnant and I was really exhausted from getting back on the writing beam and trying to write while going on a thirty-some-city book tour. On top of that, the paperback release was moved up so that Crooked River Burning would be available in paperback for Christmas so I had to unexpectedly go back out on tour in the fall. The collection would have been fine without the two new stories, but I wanted there to be some new work in the book. I was consciously trying to write stories that weren't like the others in the book. I put a little thought into what the book was missing to really be fully rounded—What did I learn how to do in Crooked River Burning and how can I apply that to the stories?
"Keegan's Load" reflects a kind of fearlessness that I built up about taking chances with point of view. It's in the first person plural—a not ridiculously uncommon but pretty darn uncommon point of view. That isn't a choice I would have had the courage to make prior to writing Crooked River Burning. "Halftime" is a story where I was really interested in the character losing control of his life, and in writing a story where I wasn't worried about controlling where it would go. I was taking advantage of one of the things that you have going for you in a story as opposed to a novel: you don't have to worry about how the scene you're writing affects something you wrote 200 pages ago. It really felt like a story, and I felt content to just let it go where it wanted to go. I was very free with it. I don't know if I necessarily think the guy in "Halftime" is cracked. Like anyone who is cracking up he may be more sane than anyone else around him.
I wrote the story in this fragmented way because my family life was very complicated at the time. I'd write a little bit during the day—in little bursts—and then everyone would go to bed except my teenage son who didn't need to be entertained. Then I'd go out and write, then come in and watch SportsCenter with him, put him to bed, and then go back out and write some more. There are large blocks of time in the story that are scattered in ways that I actually think are pleasing. Also, I have a family member who has a sleep disorder (although not narcolepsy) and I was really interested in having that subject in my story. This story is completely unlike him but I did quite a bit of research on narcolepsy and how it works during this process.
Q: In "Thirty-Year-Old Women Do Not Always Come Home," you end the story with the phrase, "Someday, someone would hear what it was Harry Kreevich was really trying to say." Does anyone, including Harry, including you, know what it was that Harry was trying to say?
A: Not in words. I really think it's ineffable, one of those moments when you read the story and you know what it means, but part of why it works is because what Harry's trying to say is the one thing he can't say, and also a "thing" that no one else could say either. It's a humble version of that great moment at the end of Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," where the narrator has a transcendent experience helping a blind man draw a cathedral while they are both stoned and a little drunk. At the end of the experience the blind man asks the narrator how he is feeling. And in reply the narrator says, "It's really something." That paraphrase in and of itself is really nothing. It's vapid. And yet I defy you to read that whole story and hit that line and not have the hair on the back of your neck stand up. I certainly wouldn't pretend that I do as good a job at it as Raymond Carver, but it's definitely the same sort of thing. If you read the last paragraph of "Thirty-Year-Old Women Do Not Always Come Home" in a vacuum you'd think, "Ok, now if I go back and re-read the story, I will be able to put that in a sentence." But if in fact you could put that in a sentence easily, the story wouldn't work. Who would read a whole story that tells a reader what he or she already knows?
Which goes back to what I was saying about the value of writing what you'd like to know. It's not so much that at the end of the story you are explaining things, it's that you are deepening the essential mystery of the story so that the reader is now inside of it. The reader understands it emotionally even if it might be a struggle to put it into words. That's what a good story ought to do. Paradoxically, this character, dear sweet flummoxed Harry Kreevich, is the most open man alive: he knows the whole world has turned into a place about which he is clueless, and yet he's willing to accept it. Harry knows what he wants to say, and the reader knows what he wants to say, and neither one of them ought to be able to put it into exact words. The reader only knows because of spending twenty minutes inside Harry's mind through the pages of the story.
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