Matt Bell, June 2010

PREORDER

We recommend it. Wolf Parts is both a retelling and reinvention of the classic fairy tale of “Little Red Riding Hood.” It features devouring from without and within, blurred and shifting identities, much blood and all it implies. The novella is violent, sexually charged, and operates on many levels of significance. The reader is cautioned: “I say wolf, but of course there are various kinds of wolves.”

The novella opens with an apt epigraph from Kate Bernheimer: “Fairy tales see things as they are. To be real is to know the consequences of becoming. Never to own, and always to die.” Wolf Parts itself is a work painfully aware of the consequences of becoming. Wolves, grandmothers, and Little Red Riding Hoods experience multiple deaths and transformations. Characters are faced with the impossibility of owning even their own bodies, and the reader treated to permutations of a tale as transitory as the lives it depicts. We emailed Matt about his sometimes fairy tale influenced work earlier this month.

Redivider: For those readers who haven’t seen the epic Facebook status updates, describe a typical day in the life of Matt Bell, literary superhero. What’s your secret identity like?

Matt Bell: A typical day starts with my own writing, whenever it can. I tend to roll out of bed and try to get into the office as quickly as possible, then write for a few hours before lunch. Usually it works out to about two hours of writing, which if I’m working hard is about the most I can do at a stretch without getting sloppy or ahead of myself. After lunch, I work on everything else: The Collagist, Best of the Web, teaching, answering emails, etc., with some other reading stretched throughout. The afternoons tend to be the more varied part of the day, which helps keep things fresh.

It doesn’t sound that exciting, does it? As you already know, there aren’t really any shortcuts to being a writer or editor or good reader. There’s just committing to doing it every day, and then doing it.

RDR: Can you tell us some of the writers you look to for guidance? For example, the Redivider staff saw Cormac McCarthy and Robert Coover in certain aspects of your work.

MB: I like those comparisons, but who wouldn’t? I came to McCarthy late, but have read most of the later books plus Blood Meridian, and certainly his works are influences on mine. Coover I haven’t read nearly enough of—It’s a hole in my reading I’ve been meaning to fill. I’ve bought the books, but haven’t read them. You know how it goes.

There are definitely writers and books that end up back on my desk no matter how often I reshelve them: Sam Lipsyte’s Venus Drive and Home Land. Robert Lopez’s Kamby Balongo Mean River. Deb Olin Unferth’s Vacation and Minor Robberies. Christine Schutt’s Nightwork. Matthew Derby’s Super Flat Times. David Ohle’s Motorman. Stanley Crawford’s Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine. Ander Monson’s Neck Deep and Other Predicaments. Michael Kimball’s How Much of Us There Was. Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. Most of Brian Evenson’s books. More I’m forgetting. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with the poetry of Arlene Ang, Hiromi Ito, and Karyna McGlynn, all writers who keep their prose close to the body in a way I find really appealing.

Over and over, I get infatuated with the way someone makes a sentence or a story, and afterward I want to have them around me all the time. This is perhaps one of the best arguments for physical books: Unlike e-books or internet pages, physical books and magazines lend their actual presence to the spaces of my house, so that their ideas are literally in the room with me as I read and write. That’s incredibly reassuring and inspiring, and an important reason to hold all these books close. That said, there are also e-books and word documents and web-published stories I keep saved and bookmarked on my iPhone, so that I can carry them everywhere with me. That’s an advantage on the other end of the spectrum, where we don’t ever have to be without the writing that’s most important to us.

RDR: Can you talk a little about the ending of “A Long Walk”? What makes this ending inevitable and yet surprising? How do you know a story is done?

MB: I first tried to write this story in January of 2009, and spent about a month on it without really getting it together. I got most of the major elements on the page, but I never wrote an ending for it, partially because the ending I had in mind was really bad. The early drafts of the story were both more fantastical and more literal-minded—the hospital literally becoming a stone labyrinth (or else the father and the boy leaving to find one), the monster literally being a physical minotaur—and that was causing a lot of problems in the draft. When I returned to the story in August, I rearranged it so that the hospital setting dominated, but I still had this more physical manifestation of the minotaur that was seen clearly by the father, who fought with it at the end of the story. I knew that ending wasn’t going to work, had known for eight months that it wouldn’t, and yet I had to write it out to free my brain to try something else. So I wrote the story that way, then sent it to my friend and writing group partner Ryan Call. Thankfully, he promptly told me the ending didn’t work, which finally gave me the freedom to throw it away and write a new one. I think I wrote this ending of the story that same night, and it stayed more or less the way it is now throughout my revision process.

That’s the technical answer. As for why it’s the right ending for this particular story: What I think I like about this ending is that the magic of it sidesteps the hard truth of the son’s death, then tries to substitute another kind of truth in its place. There is no doubt from the beginning of the story over whether or not the son is going to die, and so the story has to be about how he dies, only since we know he’s going to die, the story really has to be about how the father is going to live without him. And I think that’s what this ending provides: A way for the father to complete his caring for the son, then to make a world in which he can live with his wife being dead, with his son dying, with his own life that’s going to keep on going after they’re gone.

To answer your more general question: While nothing is ever completely finished, I sometimes get this feeling in my gut when things lock into place in a story. I edit a lot by reading aloud, and sometimes I can physically feel it when I’ve got a sentence exactly right, when I’ve got the turn at the end of paragraph perfect. I try to keep editing until the whole story feels that way, until I can read from one end to the other without hearing any missed notes or having any misgivings. There’s always something to improve later, of course, but I do my best to not take the easy way out, to take every story absolutely as far as I can.

RDR: Where did this story come from, or what did it come out of?

MB: I save a new file every time I sit down to work on a story, so it was relatively easy to go back and look at where I really started: The first paragraph I wrote was what would eventually become the beginning of section IX of the finished story, the paragraph that starts, “Soon the father realizes he must force himself to wake before the boy.” The early version of that scene, written without any idea of the story it would become, contains most of the elements of the final story: There’s the long walk, interrupted in progress, there’s medicine in their backpacks, and there’s the book being consulted by the father while the son sleeps. So I think the story probably started from that handful of elements: the long walk, the father and his sick boy, the book. Everything else that became the story necessarily followed from those elements, which sparked my imagination enough to start finding a structure to put them in.

RDR: What draws you to fairy tales, fables, or other older literary forms? What role do they have to play in contemporary literature?

MB: I can maybe only answer this question for myself, in a personal context: It’s a pretty common idea that fairy tales and fables are these static, ended things either meant for children or else relevant only to our long-dead ancestors, but I think it’s one of our great mistakes that we’ve separated our myths and our stories from our daily lives, or that we’ve singled out some (fairy tales, fables, myths) as irrelevant while clinging onto others (religions) as unquestionable truths. I myself was raised devoutly Catholic, and as a child and a teenager read the Bible very literally, which is, of course, full of all kinds of mythical and fantastical occurrences. I was similarly drawn to fairy tales, folklore, all manner of scary stories and mythologies, but for a long time I thought I had to stop participating in those non-Biblical stories to become an adult, a good Christian, a serious writer. I had to pick which stories I was going to believe in, that I was going to accept as capable of containing some portion of the truth. I was turning my back on what I found vital in the world, what I needed from the world as a person. It was a mistake, and it took some time to undo it. Reading and writing helped.

This is also a difference between most serious readers and people who might never pick up a book: When you are a person who lives and thinks and feels through story, then fairy tales and myths and so on more easily remain part of your world, just as real as anything else. For me, getting to what feels true about life is therefore not about being representational in a strictly realist way, but rather about making or finding the right world on the page with which to contain the story I’m trying to tell. Sometimes that results in a fairly realist-looking story, sometimes not. All I can do is push myself to do whatever it takes to tell the truth as I experience it or else to make a place where the reader can experience it for themselves. I’ll do this by any means necessary, am willing to add to the possibilities of the world when the most easily recognizable one won’t suffice for the stories I want to tell.

RDR: Have you noticed any common themes or preoccupations emerge in the fiction you’ve written thus far? Do you think of these themes/preoccupations as defining of you in some way? Did any of them surprise you when you noticed them?

MB: Until I put together the manuscript for How They Were Found, I’m not sure I’d ever looked for those kind of connections between individual stories, at least beyond the most superficial ones, but there were a few themes that began to emerge as I put together that book. For instance, many of those stories begin near the moment when my characters choose some alternative means of defining themselves to the world around them, or at the moment when that choice spurs them into some new way of acting and interacting. They’re looking for structures with which to make their lives livable, or else to make some new kind of life possible. Particularly in that book, many of those roles and structures eventually fall apart or fail, are exhausted in some way.

I’ve since written my next book and started another, and I’ve been able to see that while these themes aren’t exactly finished, they are shifting along a spectrum of optimism. Where the stories in How They Were Found often end in failures or incredibly hard wins (the characters succeed, but at some terrible cost to themselves or someone else), the fictions in my second book are more likely to go past those failures and exhaustions into the rebuilding and retrying and remaking that inevitably follows when the characters refuse to give up. The new book I’m working on is in some ways darker in theme and in action than both of these books, but I also think I’m trying to push through that toward what good ending might be on the other side. Maybe that’s the surprise you were looking for: I feel like I arrived at a certain place with each book, and that with each proceeding one I’ve wanted to go further, to see what’s beyond it. Right now, I’m convinced there’s a kind of hard-won optimism that I’m trying to earn, partly because I’m trying to feel that way myself in my day to day life, despite any number of depressing or difficult circumstances that might get in the way of believing.

RDR: Aside from your writing career, you are also the editor of The Collagist and the series editor of Best of the Web. What are some of the literary journals out there that excite you, that are doing new things, that you turn to first and foremost and again and again?

MB: It seems like a very exciting time for the literary magazine and for its role in contemporary literature. A couple friends and I were recently discussing how there seems to be more great fiction being written now than ever before, and I think that has a lot to do with the variety of literary magazines and the increasing access to them afforded by the internet (both because of online journals and the ease of getting print ones). We’re all finding the right writers to read faster than people used to, and that’s having a multiplying effect on the quality of the writing being done. Here are some of the best places to read that writing, in my opinion: Unsaid. NOON. New York Tyrant. Conjunctions. American Short Fiction. Hobart. Annalemma. Diagram. elimae. Guernica. Failbetter. Juked. Hayden’s Ferry Review. Ninth Letter. Puerto del Sol. Sleepingfish. Caketrain. Everyday Genius. Wigleaf. Willow Springs. Gulf Coast. Many more I’m forgetting, many more I probably don’t know about yet.

I read over nine hundred editor nominations for Best of the Web, plus hundreds more for the long lists Kathy and I compiled ourselves, and I can guarantee you there’s an amazing amount of great work being done online, all by a wider spread of writers than we could ever hope to recognize in a single volume. Add that to the work being published in print journals, and we’re well past the days when you could know twenty writers and be pretty sure you were getting most of what’s great about contemporary fiction. (If those days ever really existed, which is doubtful.) There’s a lot of stories to sift through, and an increasing number of essential writers to read. The best part is that this huge array of fictional options means that each reader should be able to discover the right writers for them, and also that every writer worth an audience should find one. I’m happy to be a writer and reader and editor in such a productive period, and I’m hopeful that what’s happening around us is going to continue to build and grow upon itself.

RDR: One last question. When will we see a Matt Bell novel?

MB: I’m writing one right now, and am almost done with a very rough draft. In the meantime, I’ve got How They Were Found this fall, then an as-yet unannounced book coming next year. So if the novel turns out well, it’ll hopefully appear sometime shortly after that. We’ll see. Writing a novel is obviously very different from writing short fiction, and the learning curve is steep. This will be the third novel I’ve finished, and the other two I never even sent out because I didn’t feel like they were good enough to want to publish. I’m trying to be patient and to make the best books I can at any particular stage, and also to be willing to admit when something’s not up to that level. Keep your fingers crossed, and check back with me in a couple years.

Thanks so much for interviewing me, and for letting me a part of Redivider. It’s been an honor.

6/1/2010