SAMPLE OF NATURAL BRIDGE THREE-PART INTERVIEW
Author - Dan Chaon
Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of the story collections Fitting
Ends and Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the
National Book Award, and the novel, You Remind Me of Me,
which was named one of the best books of the year by The
Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The
Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly. His second
novel, Await Your Reply, appears this fall. Chaon’s fiction has
been published in many journals and anthologies, including The
Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry
Prize Stories. He was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award
in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College,
where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative
Writing.
1. How’d you get to be, you know, the way you are?
I grew up in a very small town in Western Nebraska, and by very
small I mean less than 50 people. It was called Brownson, a little grain
elevator town alongside the Union Pacific railroad tracks.
It so happened that I was the only kid my age in town, and so
growing up I spent a lot of time by myself. Of necessity, I spent a lot
of time alone, entertaining myself, and a good portion of my childhood
was spent engaged in a series of complicated imaginary games—long,
involved narratives which were extensions of books or comics or TV
shows I liked.
As it turned out, this was a good preparation for becoming a fiction
writer. I still find that I need a lot of time, alone in my own head,
and the process of writing a novel isn’t that different from the kinds of
games I would play as a kid.
2. In my version of the world ______________ would be a perpetual New
York Times bestseller, ______________ would win Best Picture at the
Academy Awards and ____________ would play at least once a day from
every radio in the world.
I used to spend a lot of time thinking about such questions. As a
matter of fact, back when I was a movie-obsessed college sophomore,
I actually started to make a list of all the “undeserving” Academy
Award winners and nominees over the years, with my own preferred
films replacing the Academy’s “mistakes.” Citizen Kane didn’t win?
Outrageous! Vertigo wasn’t even nominated? Rocky beat out Taxi
Driver? Etc. Etc. It was a kind of silly exercise, but it was a fun way to
learn about the history of film and a reason to watch a lot of movies.
For a while, I was working on a novel which was an “alternative history”
of Hollywood, which featured Franz Kafka as a screenwriter—in
my alternate universe, he didn’t die of TB, but immigrated to Los
Angeles, where he worked with various people like the Marx Brothers
and Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Every once in a while, I pull
this book out and look at it but then I get daunted (see question #3).
The “what-if” game is a lot of fun, but at the same time the wording
of your question gave me pause. Is there any novel that I’d want
“perpetually” on the best-seller list? Would I want any of the songs I
really love to be playing “at least once a day from every radio in the
world?”
Actually, no. I worry that this sounds snobby, but I find myself
thinking that my favorite books and songs might feel somehow less
special if everyone liked them.
Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoy participating in big cultural
zeitgeists. I had a great time reading and talking about the Harry Potter
books along with everybody else, for example, and I love it when a
catchy song becomes a huge inescapable hit—I’m as happy as anyone
to turn up the radio when Rhianna or L’il Wayne or whoever has a new
song.
Nevertheless, there’s something peculiarly satisfying about those
bands and authors who are not part of the huge public discourse—
those artists who seem to be speaking only to you, or to a small, passionate
audience, a secret that you’ve got that the rest of the world hasn’t
gotten its hands on yet.
That sounds very selfish, but so be it. My very favorite music and
books are mine. I like that not everyone knows about them.
3. What sort of story or poem (in terms of subject matter, plot, theme) have
you promised yourself you would never write?
I have a weird feeling about historical fiction, and particularly historical
fiction that is about a real person.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to put down people who
write historical fiction, and in fact some of the novels that I’ve loved fall
under that category. For example, Hannah Tinti’s The Good Thief,
which creates this amazingly vivid nineteenth century world of
orphans and body snatching and wild frontiers; or John Fowles’ The
French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is actually more of a riff on a nineteenth
century novel than it is “historical;” or Robert Graves’ freaky,
haunting I, Claudius. And I adore Eric Larson’s novelistic non-fiction
book, Devil in the White City, among others of that genre.
And yet…for me, personally, as a writer, there’s something about
trying to insert oneself into a historical moment that seems to freeze
my imagination. Part of it, I guess, has to do with the research, which
doesn’t appeal to me; and part of it has to do with the way that that
“history” creates a rigid frame for the book. To me, writing about a
historical personage would be kind of like a coloring book, in which the
outline of the picture is already drawn for you and all you get to do is
choose which crayons you want to use. I would want to lie. I would
want to change the outcomes. I think it would be difficult for me to
stay true to the historical truths of the person, or the time period,
though I would also feel responsible for presenting them accurately.
I think it would be particularly hard for me to fictionalize someone
who is still alive, or who still had living relatives who knew them.
I think I would always feel like an imposter.
Going back to my “Kafka in Hollywood” novel, one of the things
that always seems to stop me is my fear that I can’t accurately get at the
cultural complexities of the characters, that I’m too much outside that
world to be able to truly inhabit the consciousness of those people.
When I’m writing, I have to feel that in some ways the characters are
me, that I could be them, even though at the same time my work isn’t
particularly autobiographical. The “Kafka in Hollywood” book would
need, I think, some kind of Nick Carraway sort of character who could
filter everything; and, as I said, I would need to be able to change history
to suit my own ends. Which I think would bother readers.
Of course, I may change my mind. I may find the perfect subject
and then I’ll have to eat my words.
4. Do you experience a letdown when you finish a book? If so, how do you
make the careful transition from years of working on a single project to finishing
and not working on it? How do you reenter the real world?
Actually, it seems like the life of a book lingers for a good while.
With Await Your Reply, I finished the main writing of it in October,
2008; then, shortly thereafter, it was going into copyediting, and then
I was talking to my publisher about the cover art and the summary and
so forth, and now I’m getting ready to start touring and reading from
the book and talking about it in interviews. The book’s life will (hopefully)
continue on for a while.
In my experience, it takes a year or so after the actual publication
for the book to begin to fade away. Eventually, it starts to seem like
something that happened to you a long time ago, but for an extended
period it remains immediate, and it tends to crowd out thoughts of
something new, even though it has been “finished” for a while.
During this period, I’m still writing and thinking about future
books, but it’s a bit like how I imagine it must feel to begin dating after
a long, complicated, messy divorce. You’re still really involved with the
“old” book. You’re not sure whether you are capable of loving again.
All of the new potential books are being compared to the “old” book,
mostly unfavorably. And you’re still spending most of your time talking
about that “old book,” so it’s still heavily on your mind. It will take
a while to get over it.
And the new book is still uncertain. You don’t know whether you
will fall in love with it in the same way. Maybe you will never fall in
love again?
I never truly believe I’m going to be able to write another book
until I’m well close to finished with it.
5. Once upon a time you were unpublished and largely unrecognized. What
have you learned in the years since then that makes the act of writing easier . . . or harder?
Truthfully? Almost nothing has changed.
I have enjoyed some success with my work, and I’m grateful for
that. But at the same time, I never feel particularly confident about a
new project. With each book, I learn some tricks, but I’m never sure
whether they will apply usefully in the future. It always feels like I’m
starting over, completely in the dark, and stepping into it always feels
fraught and dangerous and the probability of failure is ever hovering.
Ultimately, I have to return to the same mind set that I had when
I was “unpublished and largely unrecognized,” the mind set where I’m
doing this writing, creating this stuff, for my own pleasure and just
hoping that someone else will like it.
Once I start thinking about previous successes or failures, once I
start thinking about reviews or things that readers have said to me, the
power shuts off. I have to forget all that stuff. I have to get back to the
simple pleasures of story and character and language: a cool, resonant
description, a good sentence, the right word.
Probably, I’m always trying to find a way to return to that kid that
I was back in Nebraska, when it was just enjoyable to make stuff up, to
pretend.
When you’re alone in front of a blank page, that’s all that matters.
