Rob Roensch, February 2011

Interview with author Rob Roensch

Rob Roensch has recent work out in Avery, PANK, and Slice, and forthcoming in HOBART. He teaches at Towson University and lives in Baltimore with his wife and two daughters.

“Henry” appears in Redivider 8.1.

Redivider: Several of your stories trace people’s dissociation from their lives, doing things with their hands but not knowing or caring (or really benefiting from) what those things are – cashier, office worker, soldier, people trained by rote to perform a specific task. Are we being told so many stories that we hide our real selves in digressions? What makes a version of Thoreau the best way to access this story?

Rob Roensch: I should say first that I don’t think these things through – I mostly feel my way around in the dark. I guess I would say that the idea of a “real self” doesn’t feel right to me, or at least doesn’t help me write stories. If we’re talking big picture: there’s life, which is made of the real world and the inner world. Stories for me seem to be stories of individual consciousnesses, and the stories seem to develop from the ways the real world and the inner world touch or do not touch, how much the character wants the real world to come into concert with the inner world, how the real world can challenge and change (or not change) a character’s inner world. I guess this is my way of approaching the big old questions like: how can we best know the world? how can we best live in it?

I could say that Thoreau came into this story because he seems to be an example of someone who is miraculously able to let the real world into his inner life, someone to admire. But I really started this story because I was reading lots of Thoreau and finding him not only admirable or interesting, but funny. His focus, his unfashionable eagerness. Like I imagine him walking into a shopping mall in his 19th century outfit holding something in a closed hand shouting out: “Friends! Come see! I have captured a beetle!”

R: And his eagerness would draw something out of those friends, or lovers, like the young woman – Henry’s focus alters how she sees herself, as if by having to steer him through a workday, she comes to her own realization, her own focus.

R.R.: I hope so. I guess the story also came from what it felt like for me to read Thoreau. You hear his voice in your head talking to you, challenging you, asking you to see things differently.

R: Interesting that you ID it as an internal voice, that instead of a story about a young woman with an argumentative voice in her head, you follow Henry, who sort of obliquely challenges her by conceptualizing simple objects. I imagine Thoreau would follow “A beetle!” by holding forth re the insect, the shopping mall, their presence there, modes of transportation, his clothes relative to his friends’, his clothes relative to the beetle’s exoskeleton, all under the pretense of a pursuit of [something]. Whereas in this story the dialogue between Henry and the young woman is understated – the two of them complete a circuit that prevents him from floating away while brightening her outlook. This is a long way of asking what constitutes “reading Thoreau” for you, and whether one almost has to look after the impractical human in his work to appreciate him. Sort of a grow-to-love-him-because-you-can’t-just-leave-him-there situation.

R.R.: Reading Thoreau is a unique experience. I read and love him because of his sentences, the intensity of vision. I get absorbed in him like I would in a fictional character. But at the same time there’s that “real,” maybe impractical Thoreau who keeps kicking me out of his mind, insisting I must change my real life. He somehow doesn’t live only in my imagination but also in the world. And I like the idea of the two characters completing a “circuit.” I hope that the characters are people and the world is the world. Without the young woman’s voice there would be no story.

R: And in “I Won the Bronze Medal”, the story depends on the narrator being sealed off entirely, on the power of his internal monologue. His simplicity and scary intensity contrast Henry’s impractical but sort of innocuous thought-surges, but what’re interesting to me are the slight ratio tweaks: Henry obsesses as much as an athlete, but his obsession is abstracting from objects in order to fashion an intellectual framework that will enable his survival in a society, and he treats people more or less as categories. But the wrestler in “Medal” has an absent master, and is kind of a loyal dog (loves a few kind people so much he’ll kill anyone who messes with them). You said earlier, and I’m paraphrasing, that your fiction exists at the contact points between inner and outer worlds-in these stories (“The Customer,” too), the outer world always intrudes in some way on the inner world, instead of a sort of outside-looking-in approach to character. Do you find it harder to identify as the external? Is the internal always more interesting?

R.R.: I don’t think I would say that the internal is always more interesting, but I would say that it’s always the place I need to start. It’s a moral and aesthetic choice, but also probably a limitation. Everything I write seems to be about the drama of an individual consciousness facing the world. A relationship that is always imperfect. Some characters are sealed off inside themselves. Some characters experience the outer world “intruding” into their inner worlds. Some characters are seekers. Of course the world is more interesting than the self, but the question is how to get from the self to the world.

The world can break into the self: the best epiphanies in fiction, I think, are often the external world flashing into the inner world of a character, with or without their consent. That makes me think of Flannery O’Connor – her stories are about the true world, or grace, or the ultimate reality, or whatever you want to call it, breaking into the consciousnesses of her characters. I’m much less sure of what the “ultimate reality” is than she was.

Or a character can actively seek out the world, experience, test, think, change. Get out of his or her own head, whether that character wants to get out of his or her own head or not. Maybe a character eventually comes to an understanding of and connection to other people, to a larger world, like Raskolnikov does in Crime and Punishment.

I see that both of the examples I came up with are religious. There’s something to that.

R: Do you want to follow up on it? There’s also something to what exactly is the difference between moral/aesthetic choice and limitation.

R.R.: I suppose the examples that came to mind were religious because the essential story I seem to come back to – the more-or-less lost individual consciousness seeking meaning and connection with something larger than the self – is a sort of spiritual quest. The question is: if, for whatever reason, the quest cannot be completed within the narratives and structures offered by religion and society, how can the quest be completed?

Starting with the internal is a choice I make because the soul’s loneliness – and its desire to understand and connect to other people and the world – is an essential truth about life that I feel like I have to honor. More simply, I find myself drawn to stories that work that way.

I think that always starting with the internal (at its most extreme, the confining a story to a single, self-conscious point of view) is a limitation in the way trying to describe a city by looking out through a single window is a limitation. The world is whole, but it can’t be seen whole. How to write a starting-with-the-internal story that’s about the world and not just a description of a window and the self’s reflection in it?

I think I also meant that always starting with the internal is a sort of limit of my imagination, something I try to get past.

R: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin begins exactly that way: a window and the narrator’s reflection in it, the night outside, and the reasons one looks at a window but not out of it-memory, sadness, guilt, a loneliness of soul compressed by self-imposed limitations. You mentioned the narratives and structures that religion or society offer – what does fiction offer that’s outside them, or that at least differs? Are formal limitations (yours, anybody’s) to be worked within, or broken, or transcended, or…?

R.R.: That’s interesting, about the beginning of Giovanni’s Room-I’ve never read it so I’ll have to pick it up. The window I was probably thinking of is from The Great Gatsby, when Nick says something like “Life is more successfully looked at through a single window, after all.” And there’s layers to that word “successfully” – Nick doesn’t say “truthfully.”

There’s one ruling limitation to fiction-the fact that we can’t see inside each others’ hearts and minds. Struggle with formal limitations-whether they come from the writer or from, say, the requirements of a genre-is like the struggle of creating a map. A mapmaker wants a stranger to be able to look at a map and see the world. And there’s no simple, universal set of rules to apply – a colorful lushly detailed drawing can suggest a winding road through a forest, but so can a few perfectly placed lines and shadows.

Maybe that’s not really an answer to your question about whether or not to break formal limitations. I guess I’d say I try to keep that first, ruling limitation in mind. And I think it’s important to trust readers, to trust other people’s imaginations.

What fiction offers is the wonderful disorienting intimacy of the reading experience. There is nothing like it. Fiction allows me to feel connected, across space and time, to others while also remaining myself, sitting on my chair in my house in Baltimore, listening to my daughter pounding up and down the stairs while squawking like a Pterodactyl.

R: I would think having children is another disorienting intimacy for the writer who concerns himself with the inner self and soul-lonely characters.

R.R.: That’s true. It’s also true that “disorienting” can end up meaning the same thing as “orienting.” Because children change your life, and they tie you more closely to your life. To the weirdness and possibility of the present moment. To the truth that your life is more than your life.

The larger question here is the relationship of art to life. For me, my children help to erase the line between them. Or to remember that there is no line. When you are sitting in the dark telling a story about Mr. Nobody getting lost in a forest (and finding his way out) so your child can sleep, there is no point in thinking that the story is not real, is an escape from reality. The story is in the room with us. I feel that way not just about bedtime stories but about most everything I read and write. A story is not mere commentary, but a part of the world.