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The Theory of Light and Matter: An Interview with Andrew Porter

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

A version of this interview also appears in the January 2010 issue of The Practicing Writer.

The Theory of Light and Matter: An Interview with Andrew Porter
by Erika Dreifus

Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and has just been republished in paperback by Vintage/Knopf. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Epoch, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” He currently teaches creative writing at Trinity University in San Antonio. Recently, Andrew responded to a series of questions about his work.

ERIKA DREIFUS (ED): Andrew, the Vintage Contemporaries (Knopf) release of The Theory of Light and Matter signals a reincarnation of sorts, given that the book was originally published by the University of Georgia Press as a winning manuscript within the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction series. Please tell us the story of how the collection has come to be republished and describe any changes that may have been made to the manuscript for the newer version.

ANDREW PORTER (AP): Well, the Vintage/Knopf deal happened fairly quickly, and I was very fortunate it happened at all. At the time, my collection had been out in hardcover for about four months, and because it had done well in terms of sales and reviews, the University of Georgia Press had offered to publish a paperback edition the following fall. Around the same time, I was approached by my current agent, Terra Chalberg, who expressed an interest in trying to sell the paperback rights to a larger house. The University of Georgia Press was open to this idea, but said that they could only give Terra about two weeks to do this, as they were currently making the final decisions for their fall catalogue. I knew that the odds were against us, but I also figured that there was nothing to lose, so I gave Terra the thumbs up and two weeks later she had managed to attract several offers, all of which included the publication of my novel-in-progress as well.

Anyway, I’ve been around the writing world long enough to know that this type of thing doesn’t happen very often, and I still feel extremely grateful to Terra for making it happen. As for changes, I only made a few small ones, and they’re probably so minor that I doubt anyone would even notice.

ED: All 10 stories in The Theory of Light and Matter are told by a first-person narrator. You’re probably asked about this a lot, but could you address your obvious affinity for the first-person point of view? What do you find so appealing and effective about it?

AP: I like a lot of things about the first person. I like the intimacy of it, for one, and also the idea of assuming a persona, but probably my favorite thing about the first person is the fact that it’s an inherently unreliable point of view. This might seem like a disadvantage to some, but I think that the unreliability of it- the fact that every narrator is telling his or her story through a somewhat biased lens-can actually be a great source of complexity and tension.

ED: What do you consider the biggest challenge of the first-person p.o.v., and how do you, as a writer, negotiate it?

AP: For me, the hardest part of working in the first person is dealing with the obvious limitations and constraints of telling a story through just one lens. When I’m working on a short story, this isn’t such a problem, but when I’m working on something longer, like a novel, it becomes increasingly difficult to deal with the constraints and limitations of a single perspective. For example, I’m working on a novel right now, and though I’d initially planned to write this novel in the first person, I soon realized that it was simply too large a story to tell through just one character’s perspective, and so I switched over to the third-person omniscient and this has really freed me up.

ED: Although I found all the stories distinctive–in U.S. regional setting, in variations between male and female narrators, etc.–there is one story that seems sharply different from the rest. I’m thinking of “Skin,” which, at less than two pages, is by far the shortest story in the collection. But it’s not simply this story’s length that seems atypical. The accompanying compression seems combined with a shift in tone that I can’t quite articulate. I’m curious not only about the inclusion of this short-short story, but also about its placement in the sequence as the penultimate piece.

AP: Well, the stories in this collection are largely about memory and the way we reconstruct memory, and so even though “Skin” is by far the shortest story in the collection, I think I liked the fact that it approached this theme of reconstructing memory in a slightly different way. Not only is it much shorter than the others, but it also uses a very different style of narration, beginning as it does in the present tense, then shifting to the future tense, then ending again in the present, all the while reminding the reader that the events of the story have taken place in the past. This isn’t something I really do in any other story in the collection, and so I think that’s one of the reasons I decided to include it. As for why I decided to make it the penultimate story, that’s a good question. I think I was pretty firmly committed to the order of the first eight stories, and since I knew that I didn’t want to end with it, well, there was really only one place left for me to put it.

ED: You’ve mentioned your novel-in-progress. Can you describe that project at all (and tell us when we can expect it to be available)?

AP: I tend to be pretty superstitious when it comes to talking about works-in-progress, but I can tell you that the novel is set in Houston and that it involves a family going through a crisis. I hope to finish the novel at some point in the next year, and so I guess it might be available as soon as 2012.

ED: Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?

AP: I’ll be doing a number of readings in New York, California, and Texas over the next few months. All of the details about these reading can be found at my website: www.andrewporterwriter.com.

Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, Erika. This has been a lot of fun!

ED: Thanks so much, Andrew!

Friday Find: Smartish Pace’s Poets Q&A

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

One of the best aspects of my still-nascent poetry practice is my rediscovery and new enjoyment of poetry-only journals. One of these publications, Smartish Pace, runs a wonderful online feature, “Poets Q&A,” in which readers can submit questions to prominent practitioners of the craft; the poets respond, and a full set of questions and answers appears online.

Until November 6, you can submit a question for Carol Muske-Dukes. In the meantime you can enjoy the archive of questions and answers. I haven’t made it through the entire list quite yet, but the respondents include Eavan Boland, Bob Hicok, and Robert Pinsky, among others.

Have a great weekend, and see you back here on Monday.

Friday Find: The New Yorker’s Remnick at the CUNY J-School

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Listen to this conversation with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. Remnick’s host is Steve Shepard, dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. (I’m especially fond of the comments Remnick makes early in the discussion about learning about writing and literature from practicing writers!) Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

A Democracy of Ghosts: An Interview with John Griswold

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

A DEMOCRACY OF GHOSTS: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN GRISWOLD

By Erika Dreifus

If you visit my Practicing Writing blog, you know that I’m a longtime fan of John Griswold (also known in the writing world as “Oronte Churm”). So I was thrilled when John announced that his first novel, A Democracy of Ghosts, was to be published by Wordcraft of Oregon. And I was equally delighted when John agreed to answer some questions for all of us.

John’s writing has appeared in Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Natural Bridge, and in the anthologies The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3 (W.W. Norton) and Mountain Man Dance Moves (McSweeney’s Books). A nonfiction book will be out in 2010 from The History Press. He also writes as Oronte Churm for Inside Higher Ed and McSweeney’s. John lives with his wife and two sons in Urbana, Ill., where he teaches at the University of Illinois. Read more at www.JohnGriswold.net.

(This interview originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of The Practicing Writer)

ERIKA DREIFUS (ED): John, your novel is a work of historical fiction in multiple respects. The central action is indeed something that is part of American history. But this is also a work of family history: William J. Sneed, your maternal grandfather, is the model for the book’s protagonist Bill Sneed. What did you find to be the most significant challenge in writing historical fiction that is also, in a way, family history?

JOHN GRISWOLD (JG): The challenge was to find a plausible fictional answer to my real-life question: How could the people of a region I know so well have been involved in this thing called the Herrin Massacre, in which 20 nonunion workers from outside the community were tortured and killed in a mine riot in 1922? Where does anger on that scale come from? Fiction is particularly suited to answering that at the level of the individual.

My grandfather was not in town the day of the Massacre, he was at the state Constitutional Convention, but an earlier exchange of telegrams he had with labor leader John L. Lewis is often seen as one of the precipitating events. In life my mother idolized her father, whom I never knew, as a compassionate and perhaps even brilliant politician and labor leader. My challenge was to imagine one possible way all this could co-exist.

ED: What would you like readers, who may be encountering an account of the Herrin Massacre for the first time, to take away from your novel as far as their awareness of the event is concerned? What lessons, or unresolved questions, should we be thinking about?

JG: Unresolved is a good way to look at it. One reason I chose this event as a backdrop is that it seems to me there was no way out for those involved, in an almost classical sense of tragedy. The miners in Southern Illinois were in a system beyond their control, as we all are to varying degrees. Yet despite our limited understanding of situations we also have hope, ambition, and the desire to change things for the better.

Coal mining has always been hard, dangerous work, and at the end of the Gilded Age, miners’ pay was low and benefits nonexistent. From 1884 to 1912 a staggering 42,898 miners were killed on the job in the U.S. The union came along just before the turn of the century and started to change that. My hometown, Herrin, was seen as the heart of the most radical (and successful) UMWA district in the country.

This was also the era of a kind of class warfare in this country. John D. Rockefeller’s private mine guards and the Colorado National Guard had attacked a tent colony of 1,200 miners and their families in 1914 with machine-gun and rifle fire, then burned and looted it. Twenty-five died, including two women and ten children who suffocated in a pit under a tent where they’d gone to hide. A small civil war was fought over these issues in 1921 at the Battle of Bair Mountain in West Virginia; the U.S. Army sent planes down to bomb the miners. It was serious business on both sides of the conflict, and in the end there was no good way out. But a novel doesn’t need to offer up solutions. It just needs to portray people struggling in a concrete, sensory world.

ED: What surprised you most as you worked on this book?

JG: Sometimes after I’d used the process of writing fiction to understand how a character would react to something or what she’d say, my research would confirm it as historically accurate. Fiction and historical fact don’t have to go together, but it was pleasant validation.

ED: How did the novel find its home at Wordcraft of Oregon?

JG: My colleague Steve Davenport said I should read the novelist Duff Brenna, whom he’d gotten to know online. I did and liked his work, and Steve made a virtual introduction. Duff later published me in Perigree, where he’s the fiction editor, then told me I should submit something to Wordcraft, where he’s got a book. Publisher David Memmott kindly took my novel.

My next book, by the way, will be with The History Press, which I found through a listing at your site. It’s good to know people. (Erika’s note: I am delighted to have played a small role in the publication of John’s next book!)

ED: It appears that you needed to secure permission to reprint letter excerpts, an excerpt from a newspaper article, and some lines from Emily Dickinson. Please tell us about the permissions process.

JG: It’s easy get permissions to use text or even photographs (as with the nonfiction book I’m finishing), if you can find the holders of the rights. Sometimes authors, their heirs, and the publishing companies are all long gone, despite copyright still being in effect. Other times (as with Dickinson), you wouldn’t think copyright still holds, but it does. The most frustrating part of rights licensing is how wildly policies vary. Some give permission in exchange for a mere credit line, while others charge exorbitant fees, in my opinion. But the problem is widespread now in this our digital age: What’s intellectual property worth, and who should have access to it?

ED: Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?

JG: Thanks, Erika, for having me! The NPR station at the University of Illinois will do an interview with me on October 26, 2009, at 10 a.m., and I hope readers will tune in and call the toll-free line to continue the discussion.

ED: Thank you so much, John!

(c) 2009 Erika Dreifus.