December 2009

Below is my interview with Brian Evenson, author of Last Days from Underland Press and many other novels. Please check out his latest novel, Last Days. It’s good stuff! Now, here goes: Thanks for doing this interview. First things first, tell us a bit about yourself? Where do you hail from and other biographical goodies? I was born in Iowa and grew up in Utah (I was raised Mormon, but have left the church), but have lived in a number of other places since–Seattle, Syracuse, NY, Stillwater, OK, Milwaukee, France, Denver, etc. Currently I live in Providence, Rhode Island, where I teach creative writing at Brown University. Who/what are some of your favorite authors/books? Some of the people I always go back to are Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, especially the trilogy, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Muriel Spark, Isak Dinesen, Henry Green, and Cormac McCarthy. Recently I’ve been reading and enjoying Roberto Bolano and a French writer named Antoine Volodine. There are a few Poe and Lovecraft stories that I love. I’ve just rediscovered J. G. Ballard and am glad to have done so–his story “The Drowned Giant” is really terrific. As soon as I finish this interview, I’m sure I’ll remember a dozen things I should have mentioned… As a professor at Brown University (and a previous professor at numerous other universities), what has your experience been like with young creative writers? Do you notice any unique trends in the quality or styles of fiction coming into existence over the last decade? Is there an overabundance of overconfidence beyond what is considered normal? I like teaching a great deal and it’s always interesting to see what up and coming writers are reading and thinking about. In terms of influences and trends, things seems to come in waves–books and stories that undergrads love one year are completely forgotten or even hated by the students who come two or three years later. I think the biggest trend I’ve noticed, maybe partly because it’s something I’ve encouraged, is that I see more students reading across genre boundaries now than I did ten years ago. The boundaries between literary and genre fiction are a lot more flexible than they once were and that’s reflected in student work–there’s less interest in strictly realistic fiction and more acceptance of fiction that ten or fifteen years ago people would have dismissed as being non-realistic. I think that’s largely due to exceptionally talented writers like Kelly Link and George Saunders writing in a way that made those distinctions seem less important than they do when, say, you’re reading 70s dirty realism. I don’t think there’s an overabundance of confidence among the students–when there is, it’s usually in students that have the least to be confident about. I think, at least at Brown the opposite is true, that many students are almost too self-conscious and self-critical and as a result are in danger of crippling themselves. They have to be taught to see what’s worthwhile in their work and how to make the most of it. I think a lot of students are ambitious, but also very aware that the stories they write don’t measure up to their ambitions: a smart self-critical student who’s actually a pretty good writer can also be very good at talking himself or herself out of ever publishing because the work isn’t as good as, say, Chekhov. The thing they forget is that a good portion of the time Chekhov himself isn’t as good as Chekhov: only a fraction of his stories are really great. You’ve written nine books—eight books of fiction and one critical book. What drew you into writing fiction in the first place? Additionally, what drew you to the dark side of fiction? I’ve always loved to read, and loved to read fiction–I think it offers readers things that non-fiction or poetry just don’t offer. I started writing fiction when I was fairly young, partly in response to my mother writing and publishing a science fiction story. I think I kept writing because it gave me a kind of satisfaction that I didn’t seem to be able to find in any other activity. As for what drew me to the dark side of fiction, I’m not sure. I think I gravitated naturally toward it, maybe partly because I grew up in a culture that was relentlessly cheerful and insisted on looking at the bright side of things. That attitude, perhaps not surprisingly, made me intensely aware of what wasn’t being said, of what was being passed over, of the darker, stranger side of things. When I was fourteen or so my father gave me a volume of Kafka’s stories. It immediately clicked for me, seemed to express exactly the kind of things that the Mormon culture around me was very deliberately trying not to think about. I think, too, that that dark side gives us inroads into the nature of consciousness in a way that the bright sunny side never does, that it reveals things about human nature that are the foundation for the way the mind works. What made you write Last Days (and the story that preceded it)? Did you read something somewhere? Was it a random thought? Did your town actually have a roving cult of amputees? I think it came very simply from thinking for years and years about the Biblical verse that opens the volume, encouraging you to remove parts of yourself if they offend you–at first thinking it was rhetorical flourish and symbolic but then thinking “Well, okay, what if we take it literally? Could it serve as the basis for a gospel?” From there everything imagined itself into existence. I wish that my town had had a cult of roving amputees, but no such luck. I did live across the street when I was very, very young from someone who had lost his hand and I was somewhat fascinated by and frightened of him. The pace of Last Days is fairly quick, not