Bonnie ZoBell: The stories in your new collection Glossolalia are breathtaking, David. I’m honored to be able to interview you, to have met you, and to share the same publisher, Press 53. These stories were not only published in some of the finest magazines—Shenandoah, Puerto Del Sol, Crazyhorse, and Iron Horse Review, to name just a few—but they have won all kinds of prestigious awards, like the O. Henry, an NEA, the James A. Michener/Copernicus Society of America, a Pushcart, and so many others. These stories are so extraordinary, enveloping, so compelling – I just have to ask, is there a certain way you get your story ideas? Several different ways?
David Jauss: Thanks for your very kind words, Bonnie. I’m very pleased you found some merit in the stories.
About the only thing that’s certain about the way I get my story ideas is that the stories never come to me full-blown. Most often, they start with a detail or a situation that interests me, usually for a reason I can’t identify until much later, if ever, then I proceed by trial and error to find out what will happen. For example, “Tell Me Something” started with an elderly man I saw in a café in my hometown, Montevideo, Minnesota. He was all dressed up in a suit, but although his shirt was buttoned all the way up, he wasn’t wearing a tie. As he paid his bill, he told one of the waitresses he was on his way to see his wife at Luther Haven, a local nursing home, and after he left, another waitress remarked that he’d be embarrassed when he discovered he’d forgotten to put on a tie. I’m still not sure why this moment interested me, but it led me to try to imagine this man’s visit with his wife. In my first few attempts to write the story, he was its main character, but eventually I realized his wife was the true protagonist, so I let her take center stage. And when she asked her husband of sixty years to tell her something he’d never told her before, I was as surprised as she was by his answer, though I should have guessed that the café would make its way into the story somehow.
Sometimes I don’t even have as much as I had when I started “Tell Me Something.” One day I sat down with nothing more than the desire to write a story. The day before I’d finished a short essay on James Wright’s great poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” in which the speaker sees “The droppings of last year’s horses / Blaze up into golden stones” in the sunlight. Those lines were on my mind, so I wrote the sentence “Struck by sun, anything’s beautiful.” And then I tried to figure out who said that sentence and why. I wrote quite a few false starts before I came up with the eventual narrator, a serial killer with a poetic sensibility who recounts the story of his first murder. (Trust me, the character isn’t based on James Wright.)
As I hope these examples make clear, the less I know about a story when I start it, the better chance I usually have of writing something worthwhile. I think it’s important to be in a state of not-knowing when you work on a story. As Donald Barthelme said, “Not-knowing is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.” Essentially, Barthelme is just rephrasing Keats, who said to succeed as a writer you must have Negative Capability, which he defined as the ability to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” If we’re too certain about where a story is going to go, if we’ve got it all outlined in our minds, our imagination shuts down and we wind up writing the literary equivalent of a connect-the-dots drawing. I like to think of writing as a higher form of reading: we might have some idea about what’s going to happen but we’re not completely sure until we get there.
BZ: In “Torque,” one of my favorites, Larry Watkins saws his 1974 Cadillac in half the day after his wife leaves him. The car has been a bone of contention between them since they first married. In high school he envied classmates with expensive cars he couldn’t afford, and it’s been a dream of his since his stint in the military to build a limousine. He’s always felt he could build one himself.
From the day he has it towed to his and his new wife’s home in Minnesota, though, she has wanted him to get rid of it, even though he talked all about it when they were dating. A neighbor’s middle-aged daughter, Elizabeth, who is mentally handicapped, starts escaping her home and coming over to Larry’s to sit in the car in his garage, obviously enjoying the vehicle very much. Larry humors her that they are indeed out on a car ride in the countryside. He seems to enjoy these moments, and I think he identifies with her more than anybody else. Could you talk about what the car means to him and why he so enjoys making believe with his neighbor’s mother?
DJ: I think Larry believes the car will resolve his self-esteem issues. If he has a limo, he thinks, people will admire and envy him the way he admired and envied the rich kids of his town with their Corvettes and Austin-Healeys. He thinks having a limo would make him sophisticated and mysterious—in short, it would make “somebody,” not just an ordinary guy who works at ShopKo. When he first thinks about getting a limo, he fantasizes about “sipping champagne in the back seat with a pretty redhead while his chauffeur drove them down Main Street,” but of course, that fantasy doesn’t come true. Instead, he winds up being the chauffeur for a far from pretty redhead—Elizabeth, his mentally challenged neighbor—in a car that, like his fantasy, is sawn in half and can’t be restored. But even though the fantasy doesn’t come true, he clings to it and takes what little pleasure remains in his life by pretending to drive Elizabeth wherever she imagines she’s going.
BZ: In another story—and let me tell you, I’ve got so many pages folded over in my copy of the book marking favorite parts, I hardly know which to talk about—in “Constellations,” a young mother and her husband don’t have much money. Angela is home with her baby, and Tony has taken the car to work. In the past, Tony had an affair. Angela says she’s forgiven him, but we can see that this forgiveness isn’t yet entirely felt. The baby, Marly, develops a fever, and Angela rushes to catch the bus to go to the doctor. The air conditioning is broken on this seething day, her baby is burning, and then something abhorrent happens and everybody has to evacuate the bus. In what can be seen as an instinctual act of self-preservation, Angela, standing outside, suddenly realizes that she’s left Marly on the bus. She’s humiliated, doesn’t know how to rectify the situation with the police who are now on the scene. She thinks she might be the worst mother ever. This whole situation causes her to look back on her husband’s indiscretion with more true forgiveness than she’s ever felt before.
The way you get at what’s really going on inside people, what really motivates them, is captivating. Do you think the couple in this marriage would have made it if it were not for the incident on the bus? Do you think they’ll make it now?
DJ: I think you’re absolutely right: because of what Angela’s done, she’s finally able to forgive her husband. But I don’t think she’ll ever be able to forgive herself for abandoning Marly, and that may ultimately cause as much damage to their marriage as her inability to forgive him did. And while the incident on the bus does help repair her relationship to her husband, at least temporarily, it harms her relationship with Marly. At the end of the story, she is metaphorically in the same position she was right after she abandoned Marly in the bus: separated from her, unable to reach her.
BZ: It strikes me that in both of the stories I like so much above, money or the lack thereof, is a big factor in the lives of your characters. Do you do this intentionally? One of the things I like so much about Raymond Carver stories is that they’re always about real, working class people. Is it important to you to write about plain old folk who are struggling as opposed to rich people?
DJ: I’m far from being a card-carrying member of the “Write What You Know” school of fiction—I’m with Grace Paley, who said we should write from what we know into what we don’t know—but I’ve had to worry about money all of my life, so I suppose I’m instinctively drawn to writing about people who have the same kind of worries. I’m sure rich people have all the same extra-financial problems and worries the rest of us have, but we also have the financial struggle and that’s a struggle that often leads to desperate behavior and thus even more trouble and conflict—the things that give fiction its life.
BZ: I’ve been talking about some of my favorites. Do you have one that has stayed with you, haunted you. And/or one that was unusually easy to write?
DJ: None of the stories was easy to write. I’m a very slow writer. I know some excellent writers who are able to dash off a first draft, but it usually takes me months to finish one, chiefly because I take a lot of wrong turns in the labyrinth and have to go back to point f or point x—even sometimes point a—and go in another direction. Revisions take almost as much time because once I have a first draft, I finally know what the story’s about and so I have to reshape everything to that end. I hoped I’d be a faster writer now that I’m retired from my day job at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and teach only in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, but so far I’m still just plodding along at my usual tortoise pace. I envy jazz musicians, who can compose wonderful improvisations on the spot. Me, I have to mull things over for a long time before I can come up with anything worthwhile.
Of all my stories, I think “Glossolalia” is the one that has stayed with me and haunts me the most. It was also the hardest to write. I spent nine months on the first draft, and every day I sat down with the fear that all of my work was for naught because I couldn’t see any possible way to resolve the story without melodrama and a heavy-handed moral. The story seemed headed toward one of two possibilities, neither of which I could stomach: either Danny’s father would die before Danny could reconcile with him, leaving Danny wracked with guilt and regret, or Danny and his father would have a tearful reconciliation and forgive each other. After months of anxiety about how to end the story, I wrote the final two pages of the story almost as fast as I could type. I wrote the sentence “Despite everything that had happened, our life together after that winter was relatively peaceful,” and somehow that sentence unlocked my stalled brain and the rest of the final section just tumbled out. I may have changed a word or two here and there, but otherwise the ending is exactly what I wrote that day.
It wasn’t until after I’d already written the ending that I understood its meaning: rather than resolve his issues with his father directly, Danny tries to resolve them indirectly, through his relationship with his own son, but without realizing it, he succeeds only in continuing the pattern that started with his father’s nervous breakdown. Just as Danny’s father babbled glossolalia-like nonsense during his breakdown, so Danny repeats his comforting words to his son “until the words sounded as incomprehensible to me as they must have to him.” And although he’s attempting to comfort his son, he’s actually frightening him, just as Danny’s father frightened him during his breakdown. Regardless of his best intentions, Danny repeats with his son the cycle he was never able to break with his own father. In this, I hardly think Danny is alone. I think most of us try to resolve our issues with our parents through our children, and I think most of us fail. The ending may be about an attempt to comfort both Danny’s son and himself, but ultimately it’s not a comforting ending. Everything will not be all right, perhaps because of, not in spite of, how much he loves his father and his son.
One other comment: people who don’t write stories themselves might assume that I wrote the ending of “Glossolalia” so quickly because I was “inspired,” but I don’t think there’s any such thing as inspiration, at least not without a lot of hard work in advance. The way the ending came to me is just an extreme example of what happens over and over throughout the writing process: we try repeatedly to solve a problem consciously, and the failure of our efforts sets our unconscious to work on the problem, and then, after a period of time, the solution suddenly comes to us when we least expect it and so feels like “inspiration.” There’s nothing unusual about this process; we all experience it. For example, last week I was trying to remember the name of the singer who recorded a marvelous scat-filled version of Gershwin’s “Summertime” back in the 60’s, and after racking my brain for ten minutes or so, I gave up. The next day, when I wasn’t thinking about the song or anything remotely related to it, the answer just popped into my head: Billy Stewart. Clearly, the conscious effort to remember the name pushed the problem into my unconscious mind, which then went to work on solving it. Inspiration isn’t what starts the creative process, in short, it’s what ends it. We must start with intense, conscious labor; without that, the unconscious simply doesn’t get involved in solving the problem. If we wait around for those sudden moments of inspiration to come to us, in short, they never will. We have to earn them with hard work.
BZ: What are you working on now?
DJ: I’m working on a second volume of new and selected stories that Press 53 will publish next year. It’s tentatively called Last Rites: More New & Selected Stories. It’ll contain a few things I didn’t have room for in Glossolalia as well as several new stories. And to answer your question more specifically, at the moment I’m working on a story about a woman who is abducted by a teenage boy who intends to rape her. I’m hoping he won’t succeed, but I haven’t found out yet what will happen.
BZ: It’s truly a pleasure to hear you talk in so much dept about your work, David. Thanks so much for coming by.
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