Water People Casey Hannan
				My True Companion Donna D.Vitucci
				Slips Justyn Harkin
				The Door Nick Scorza
				Patrick Somerville & Lindsay Hunter

What follows is a conversation between two Hobart favorites. We asked Lindsay Hunter (author of the fantastic collection Daddy’s) and Patrick Somerville (author, most recently, of the equally fantastic collection The Universe in Miniature in Miniature) to talk to one another about writing, and we are happy to share with you the results.

LH: Patrick, I’m in the midst of being moderately to severely sick of myself. Everything I write feels unoriginal and I often wonder what I’m contributing to the world. I worry that people read my stuff as one-note: it’s either intensely “sexual” or intensely “grotesque.” But that’s never what I aim for. In my mind, as I write, I’m telling the truth. I feel that I’m writing something elegant and restrained, something Gilead-esque, and then the story comes out like a letter to Penthouse screamed into the void by a lonesome car wash attendant. And what in that is helpful to a reader looking for the best in human nature? Shouldn’t I, as my dad once plaintively asked, write stories about puppies or clowns?

These are my current anxieties about being a writer. Being a writer often feels like a theme park of anxieties with sporadic trips to the ice cream stand. Please agree with me.

PS: Lindsay! I do about the anxieties, although I would also add (in order to clarify and simplify your metaphor) that the ice cream stand you describe is not a normal ice cream stand, and is in fact an arcane, ancient, mysterious, crucial, glowing, vertiginous, healing nexus fountain oasis of the universe as well as being an ice cream stand. And not just for you, the person going to it. For you, for the server, for everyone in the park, and for everyone outside of the park, too. Even for people who have never heard of the park. All dead people. People who would never, ever, go to the park. And also, actually: people who hate the park.

But let me go through some things one by one before I talk about the ice cream again, as you’ve just posed one billion interesting questions, and I am nothing if not fastidious. This is going to be too long, but I can’t help it. You started with too much fantastic density.

First thing: I am suspicious of all writers and human beings who are not sick of themselves. To be in this state speaks highly of your character, as it implies that you know yourself well but are not satisfied with what you see. In other words, you are your own harshest and most sadistic critic, which is the starting place for any good writer, and you are also in a state of wanting, needing, and struggling to grow despite the relative safety and security of your own (quite lovely) identity. So kudos, because it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. It really doesn’t. You have a job, you have a life, you have an extremely likable husband, you have many friends. You’re not doing this because you’re lost and alone. And yet you choose the weirder, harder, lonelier road, too.

Second thing: I find it hilarious, endearing, and totally inaccurate that you describe your own work as “unoriginal.” I feel confident that no other writer has ever written the sentence, “My stomach filled with the urchin,” and done so in a way wherein the meaning of that sentence, alongside the intense and visceral feeling that it brings with it, is totally obvious to the reader. I read that and know exactly what it means, I really do, and that’s a fucking nutso sentence, Lindsay. We’re deep in the very subjective and admittedly strange lexicon of your figurative imagination and we’re understanding the language as we hear it because of the way you’re teaching it to us, because of the timbre of your voice, because of the gestures you make as you say it. I could right now list off a solid five dozen exceptionally odd, unique, and surprising moments of original language from Daddy’s and not come close to exhausting the pool. And so in this way you’ve clearly contributed a good thing to the world.

I know you didn’t come here fishing for compliments, though, even though I’d like to keep giving them, as I love your book. So more to the point. What I hear in what you say is: shouldn’t it be beautiful, shouldn’t it be wise, and shouldn’t it make people happy? Despite all our poses and posturing? Despite the romanticism of ennui, the cool that comes from a punk outsider sneer? To those three questions I say yes, yes, and yes. It should always be beautiful, it should always be wise, and it should always make people happy. I think that. But it has to be authentic. To do any of that, it has to be authentic. And I know: that word, authentic, can mean a lot of things. But here’s how I think of it in this context: for fiction to be authentic, the reader must be able to arrive at a place of simple, strong emotion without feeling as though they’ve been brought there by somebody who doesn’t understand anything about the devious, awful complexity of life and of people. To wit: Chicken Soup for the Soul feels wrong, feels light, feels meek because we sense that the author of the uplifting tale is lost in a cotton candy lala-land of positivity that’s based on repression, self-denial, the deeply disturbing way that capitalism tries to sell us happiness, and the willful ignorance that is the backbone of our cultural consumption. It hasn’t been hard to get to uplifting, and because of that, it’s not uplifting.

When I read Daddy’s, I hear voices rejecting, loudly, that narrative. I hear voices pleading with the reader to learn about honesty and voices assuring the reader that even in an honest world, beauty, wisdom, and happiness are still there. But to be fair, those voices are sometimes necessarily grotesque, those voices probe the id, those voices can be cacaphonous, those voices are messy, those voices are often screams, sometimes even wails. Sometimes ugly? They have to be. And what I think you’re doing with your writing is trying to clear a path to something you believe in that’s authentic, something that’s true, but something that doesn’t deny the reality of life. That’s a lot of brush-clearing; to me this means you perceive bullshit very well.

I’m going on way too long, so let me take a sharp turn and tell you about my self-doubt and hopefully link it up to this conversation before I stop. I once met a guy at a writerish party and told him my name and he rolled his eyes as he shook my hand and said, “You wrote The Cradle, right?” I nodded as I was shaking his hand and said, “Yes, and can I just say that I love it when people roll their eyes when they hear my name?” I tried to make this sound very hostile and not smile at all, because I really did feel upset about what I thought was the superiority I heard in his voice, but he either chose to ignore it or didn’t notice, and we didn’t really talk much after that. But I was mad, and also felt really shamed and embarrassed, because what I’m pretty sure he was saying was, “You’re the guy who wrote that cheesy grandma novel called The Cradle, right?” In other words, he was an arbiter of the authentic and he had deemed my writing to be inauthentic and therefore deemed me dismissible. Now there’s a chance I totally projected this whole thing onto him, because I am a self-conscious weirdo when I’m at writer get-togethers, and I also doubt he’d actually read the book, and was responding to the marketing, but I’m pretty sure something like this was in the air. And it both crushed me and enraged me, because I feel like this is sort of a justifiable opinion, at least superficially, but also exceptionally short-sighted and cynical, and I also feel like this is the opposite consequence of what you described right at the top, this is the other side of the coin of the “grotesque” and “sexual” typecasting. I feel like The Cradle comes at this whole thing in a completely different way, and that as I wrote it I tried to just ignore my own inhibitions about the earnest expression of emotion and the earnest use of straightforward narration and straightforward storytelling, because I’d come to a point as a writer where I felt as though my fear of cheesiness and my obsession with some kind of tonal authenticity had completely masked my heart and turned my writing into this soulless meta-exercise of competing ironies, and that I needed to overcome my fear of non-coolness to get to a riskier emotional place. I was sick of myself, but may have made myself sicker of myself by trying to be not sick of myself.

So here are some questions to you, in the spirit of these two dangers, the earnest and the raw, the Scylla and Charybdis of fiction: What does the word “authenticity” mean to you, Lindsay? And what does the word “cheesy” mean to you? What is your favorite love story out there, for real, not with a super-ingenious witty deflection of an answer but really, truly, tell me a love story that has made you cry, please? And finally, irritatingly but also crucially: What is the point?

LH: That fear of cheesiness plagues me to the point of paralysis! Because I feel that the cheese of straightforward narration/straightforward storytelling/plain emotion is also the cheese of going overboard with any sort of “extreme.” But I think the disservice readers can do to most any author is to assume that the author sat down and pooped something out without too much thought about hitting the right tone/telling the right story (that’s hard to determine sometimes!)/aiming for the right body part in a reader (I often feel like a modified Upton Sinclair quote: “I aimed for the heart and hit the crotch/gag reflex”).

(Also, weirdly, I read your thoughtful, generous, barbed, wonderful answer to my question at the same time I was reading Swamplandia!, and I read your answer, then soon after opened the book to keep reading, and one of the characters was talking about Scylla/Charybdis. Is this relevant to this discussion? Probably not, but I still find it interesting.)

“Authenticity,” to me, means the absence of ego in what you’re writing. I have often failed at this; even as I’m working hard at being authentic in describing a scene or a character’s emotion, there is a slice of my brain saying “If you write it this way, people will think you’re cool” and man that is gross but it’s true. Being authentic means turning this part off and just (all my peoples in undergrad Fiction 101 say what) “following the story.” My husband always says he can tell when I’m writing something good because I am pretty much in a trance. I don’t leave my desk every five minutes to check the cabinets for chocolate, I don’t get on the Internet to Google “is Robert Loggia still alive?”; I just sit and watch the story unfold. To me, that is when it’s authentic.

I wanted to be an actress for a long time, for my whole life up to a point, and I studied the method at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, and from what I can remember, “the method” is constantly working toward that same sort of trance-like authenticity. You have the script, you have your words, and now you must enter the trance and let it unfold before you, which is exactly what it feels like even though without you, the story couldn’t unfold.

I think that’s why “going to the desk” is so critical, even though this is perhaps where I fail the most at being a writer. Going to the desk helps you access this trance; it becomes muscle memory that you can draw upon more and more quickly if you maintain its practice. There is less and less of that frightful jittery crap, that up and down to the cabinets, that writing a sentence that is immediately erased because the blank page was better without it.

“Cheesy” means going only where someone, or many someones, before you have gone. Going the safe route of rewriting a story you’ve read a hundred times - its arc feels like your baby blanket at this point, it is so comforting to return to, it is so figured out without you. I mean this in terms of plot but maybe even more so in terms of language. I once got an acceptance letter from Thieves Jargon saying “we get too many “weirdos in diners” stories, but this one felt different.” I was bursting with pride at this (and then - and now - immediately shamed by this pride, oh the joys of finding a delicate balance of self-worth). I think the difference for them was in the language and characters.

And that is what I’m getting at: I believe, should you skin every plot there ever was, you would likely find the mottled skeletons of ten or a dozen core narratives. This feels like a bold, reckless statement, but I’m just going to go with it. At its core, when it’s done well, writing is about describing what it’s like to be human in the hopes that another human out there recognizes him or herself and feels something. (I can’t adequately express how happy it makes me that I am in the business of attempting to reach other human beings in this way. My whole life, it’s all I’ve wanted.) So the stories that are told are, when recklessly simplified, simple. But what makes them unique are the choices the writer makes. When to end the chapter? When to peek in at this character’s life? When to leave this character alone? When to trust the reader? What word, what word? What word. To me, that’s everything. If you find the right word, you’re off. If you use words that are easy to use, they do the job but aren’t unique in any way, you’re the worst. “It was a dark and stormy night” being an extreme example. I’d rather it just read “It was raining.” I often - and I’ve been called out for this - describe the sky in my stories. I think that’s because there are so many different ways to do it, and because there is this opportunity to describe it in a way that tells a story in itself. I never want to describe the sky just to describe the sky, or for poetic/emo purposes, but because I think I am getting at something else, another look or view, in the story than simply what the narrator or characters are doing. But maybe that is a waste of time? I’m sure I’ll still do it, because I like doing it, it’s important to me.

(Swamplandia!, incidentally, is at its core about a family in which the mother has recently died. But that skeleton is wonderfully fleshed with many delights, language being one of the most exciting for me.)

And speaking of core narratives, you asked me about love stories. The first one that came to mind was Waking the Dead by Scott Spencer, which I read while in France at age 21, so maybe I couldn’t help but be taken with it. It’s about a man whose girlfriend dies, but then it turns out she is maybe not dead. The man remembers all the difficulties of their relationship, all the impossibilities, and yet his love for her remains. At the end they are reunited in this weird way and it kind of ends with a flat acceptance that she is not dead (maybe) and they would not have worked out. What a disappointment! But it stayed with me - that’s life, I told myself, tell myself. Nothing is what it seems, especially when it comes to love. But even more telling, what stayed with me most was not my own brave acceptance (ha!) at this ending, but the burning love that was described before the relationship was forced to an end. (Embarrassingly, I even quoted a line in the book in a desperate card sent to a boy I loved. The card was navy blue with stars flecked across it; the inside was blank and I filled every cranny with words to this boy, including “And I always always always will,” the stolen line. Man.)

Love stories seem like maybe the most difficult stories to write in terms of authenticity. Who wants to read another love story about a strong-willed woman and her silently suffering soulmate, if there isn’t anything new on the line? Am I wrong in saying that The Cradle is a love story? You mentioned barriers you had to break through in order to get to a riskier place emotionally. How did you do that? Did you have anyone sniffing the air around you for bullshit as you wrote?

PS: I think rather than people there sniffing around, writing that book felt good because I didn’t spend a lot of time sniffing around myself. (A ridiculous sentence, I’m sorry.) I just remember that time as a happy time when I eased up a little on myself and just let go. And hopefully something good came of it, even though the book certainly has plenty of flaws. Eased up and stopped sniffing, though, as opposed to what I was saying about those voices of competing ironies...that’s like having a dozen obnoxious dudes in the room, all rolling their eyes at once at every sentence. You can’t work like that. I think it also helped that I was playing a lot of music at the time. I don’t really know how that fits, other than to say that folk music in general--my favorite instances--remains wry and self-aware but is regularly up for some straightforward bombs of emotion, too. I love that. Think of just the title of the Hank Williams song Steve Earle just used as the name of his novel: “I’ll Never Get Out of the World Alive.” Such a tricky little phrase, but also totally in earnest. There’s that balance. I would trade everything I’ve written to have written one Townes Van Zandt song. But I guess if I wrote it it wouldn’t be a Townes Van Zandt song.

I know what you mean about “writing with no ego” and the trance thing, but it also sort of contradicts my sense that all writers require delusional levels of ego just to even embark. Does this ring true to you? And then a slightly trickier issue right alongside this: it is you (i.e. your ego) that’s going into that text in the first place, it really is a pouring of the self into a story. And by that I don’t mean “Bill” from this story you write is “really” “Greg” from real life. Not that. It’s more just the mathematics of composition--one human sits down and writes a story, that whole story came from that one human. It’s a closed system. It’s gotta be. I’m struggling with understanding these contradictions, though, because I believe all the ends of this cluster at the same time. Maybe the synthesis of the ideas lies in different uses of the word “ego”. My wife, who is a psychotherapist, would right now be scolding me and laughing at me if she saw how sloppy I was being with it. When she says “ego” she means something closer to “self.” But it sounds like what you’re referring to is something like...an unearned and easy satisfaction with oneself. Which is writing death.

That story about you cheesing out to the Scott Spencer line is fantastic. Embrace the shame, Hunter. We are what we are. I can’t tell you how many times I wept openly in the halls during middle school regarding love problems. Not good for popularity. But I am what I am.

Oh, something else entirely: what are you working on right now? I’ve heard rumblings that it’s amazing.

LH: I guess when I say “ego” I mean “the fugliest part of your soul.” And speaking of, I am working on a great chaotic blend of nothing and everything. I can’t stop writing stories, that is something I’ve discovered. And I also dream of, before the end of the year, finishing this novel.

But all of it feels like a smear on a Kleenex. What about you? You are in the throes of finishing a new novel, right? And I hear tell there is amazing news on the horizon...care to spill it?

PS: Not yet, but good things seem to be brewing. We’ll see what happens. I don’t want to jinx it.

And yes, I’ve been working on a novel for a long time and it’s just about done. It’s called This Bright River, and it’s out next summer. It is very, very, very, very, very cheesy.