Matt Baker, July 2011

An Interview with Author Matt Baker

Matt Baker’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, Memorious, and Ninth Letter, among others. He is a founding editor of Nashville Review at Vanderbilt, and his ongoing electronic novel, The Numberless, is published at thenumberless.com. Baker interviews Michael Martone in issue 8.2 of Redivider.

Redivider: When you interview Michael Martone, do you know which Martone you’re interviewing? Much has been made – by Martone and you and other writers – of his multiplicity.

Matt Baker: I know there’s a voice box inside a neck that answered my questions through a mouth and was waiting for me in a body at the agreed upon place at the agreed upon time. But I do like to think that by some incredible coincidence I got hoodwinked by one of the many Martones floating around, and the “real” Michael Martone, or another of his doubles, is moving and breathing in the world as someone who thinks I stood him up.

R: If you ever met that one, there’d be trouble?

MB: Trouble. Probably. But I doubt we’ll meet. He’s like a comet.

R: Do you think writers ought to interview, or at least learn to do it well?

MB: No. You usually can tell, though, when an interviewer doesn’t care or know how to research, converse, adapt, or get out of their subject’s way. And that can be a good sign of whether someone’s writing is any good, or at least who in general the interviewer finds more interesting. It isn’t a good or bad thing, the fact that you do or don’t – but when you do, there’s no way you can get away with laziness. It’s always obvious when someone hasn’t prepared and is nervous about the act of interviewing someone else. But the latter hardly matters at all.

R: But do you think it’s made you a better writer?

MB: It’s made me a better interviewer, maybe. I’m more familiar with it than I had been and don’t make the same mistakes all the time. Only some of the time. But by what metric do you – look, who gets to say whether a person has improved, as a writer? Average Writer, indentured to a future MFA.

R: I would think it’s an understanding between the person doing the writing and the people to whom that writer addresses the work.

MB: You’re being so careful to stay gender neutral. So there’s an unspoken “understanding” between parties, the writer and the reader?

R: I guess it would have to be unspoken. But I don’t know whether it’s an understanding. Generally the two don’t agree.

MB: They don’t even agree that the other has any business saying things like “better writer.” You’ve seen them: writers who think their readers are idiots because “readers are people and people are idiots,” the artist is supreme, all that. Or, flip side, readers who justifiably despise writers for pretentiousness and condescension. In fact, saying that a writer has “gotten better,” as a general statement without a connection to something specific carried from one piece of writing to another, is meaningless. And then, what, so the writer’s “better” – how’s the book? Is there even a book? Stories? How is a writer’s persona manifested? Or whatever question you like. But that other one is a waste of time.

R: “Writers improve in private”?

MB: Who said that?

R: I made it up.

MB: I like it.

R: In your interview, you ask Martone several questions about how he feels about binaries like fiction/nonfiction, novel/memoir, and prose/poetry, particularly as labels. He responds that “they don’t seem like categories worth maintaining” and “assume some sort of personal authority over reality.” Is that in part what an interview ought to undermine, or to gradually strip away (assumptions of personal authority over reality)?

MB: If interviewers matter at all, they function as conduits for people reading or taking in the interview. “Their” questions, “their” counterpoints, “their” sense of probing a writer. Interviewers who just go after personal details believe the purpose of an interview is to “inform,” which puts an ugly kind of pseudo-journalistic gloss on tedious appeals to social norms. “Just trying to get the truth, folks.” So-and-so’s battle with booze, depression, the IRS, whatever might make her abnormal. Not that those things ought to go ignored entirely, but as the focal point of an interview, it’s often a hack job. The writer doesn’t matter, the work doesn’t matter, even the details as particular to a person don’t really matter – they’re all absorbed by the breaking story, which is more or less that this so-and-so is human like all of you, and so much for the myth.

Again, the party that matters to the interviewer, in that scenario, is…? Who is left? Plus then you just end up with trivia – Michael Martone likes turkey chili. Michael Martone clips doilies to his hair while having sex. Michael Martone often smells like olive oil, which Michael Martone’s friend says Michael Martone in a pinch will dab under the Martone arms as deodorant. That’s a long way of starting to answer your question, but it’s important to remember that an interviewer slips up by trying to contribute to an authoritative look at a human being, which is impossible anyway. As if we finally understand people once we’ve skinned them.

R: If not a human being, then what? And who gets to decide that?

MB: Not an “authoritative” anything, either. Proceed along a line of inquiry, or several, until time’s up. It’s not a matter of anyone’s “deciding” that one way is correct, I’m just pointing out interviewer behavior that lends itself to superficial interviews. It isn’t at all a terrible state of affairs when people and their work are difficult to categorize or quantify.

R: We seem to be discussing a very specific kind of interview. Obviously a reporter does investigative interviews, or police do cognitive interviews, or, well, I’ve been using a kind of semi-structured ladder approach, for example.

MB: Did you look all of that up before or after you started doing it?

R: After.

MB: It isn’t that the kind of interview doesn’t matter. It isn’t that labels like fiction/nonfiction don’t matter. It isn’t that “personal details” don’t matter. It’s that they aren’t anything you’re obliged to obey. Writers – here it is, writers can go at it from the other direction: the form obeys you. The rules obey you. You decide the extent to which you accept the labels that can be applied. Now that you’ve named this interview, it’s less fun to talk to you, and you’ve opened the door to questions about whether you have the right to call it that. You’ve appealed to an authority whose writing or lectures you probably have never read or heard. Which isn’t wrong by whatever your morals are, but, as an interviewer, it’s your mistake.