David Vann – Live Q and A – March 23rd

85 thoughts on “David Vann – Live Q and A – March 23rd”

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3. That was truly wonderful and inspiring! Thanks everyone for making it possible.

4. Night, all.

5. Thanks, Loree. I enjoyed it. And sorry about thinking earlier that it was just one hour rather than 90 minutes. My mistake. But thank you all, and best of luck in your own writings.

6. Many thanks, David, on behalf of us all. A real privilege.

7. Right, well, I think that about wraps things up, David. Despite a couple of technical hitches it looks like we made it… Thank you again for joining us tonight/this morning. It’s been…truly exhausting.

8. In writing Caribou Island, I just kept returning to describing the place, and that was my way through the book, keeping in mind, also, of course, the conflict between the characters.

9. It is nice to have the wide-open desolation of Alaska, though. I admit that’s a wonderful cheat.

10. I love reading and writing wilderness. The literal landscape extends into figurative landscape which is how we learn theme, inside life of characters, etc. And you don’t need true wilderness. My new novel is set mostly in a walnut orchard which is a wilderness. That works too.

11. I apologise if I’m entering these comments out of sequence — I’ve got carrots rather than fingers! My other Q was about ‘wilderness’ stuff. I love the way you load the natural dangers on the characters in ‘Legend’. That little bit of menace which Carver identified as essential to short fiction is there in abundance. I’m envious of the way in which North American writers can draw on this resource of the wilderness, particularly in Alaska — it ups the stakes. In England, we have to do quite a lot to make the squirrels seem menacing! I just wondered how you think wilderness works in your imagination. Is it something that already excites before you sit down to write? In ways do you think wilderness can enrich a piece of writing?

12. Thanks, Dora. You have to be ready to piss everybody off and lose everybody. If my new novel gets published, I honestly believe I’ll lose my mother (I’m not just saying that), and I’m willing to do that. The writing can’t have anything in the way, otherwise it’s worthless.

13. I have to give you a lot of credit for sticking to your guns and writing what feels true to you. I’ve spent over 30 years trying not to write what I was meant to write so thank you for your honesty. It takes a lot of courage, courage that I need plenty doses of… Thanks again and I can’t wait to read your book.

14. Jones’ “The Pugilist At Rest” includes art history essay, showing that you can draw from other genres and blend forms. Those are a couple quick examples. The rule you can’t break, I think, is that every story has to be at least two stories. If there’s no subtext, nothing else we’re reading for beyond the occasion or surface story, we stop reading.

15. Hi Alison,
    It was fun meeting you at that festival, too.
    Diaz’ “Drown” has the crises in the past event, instead of keeping the dramatic story in the present.
    Wolff’s “The Liar” is half background material, which is supposed to bog a story down (he makes us think we read scenes, even though we read narration organized as an essay)…

16. Hi Dave,
    That reading was fun, and I loved the Small Wonder Festival. Diana’s great, too. I’m not sure I have advice, except to enjoy it. I love being on stage, and I would spend a lot more time there if anyone would let me. I was a ham even when I was four. So I always have a great time. And I think it’s important not to ever prepare. That way the discussions remain fresh.

17. Hi David,
    It’s a treat to have you here. What are some of your favourite stories, old or new, that ‘break the rules’?
    Alison

18. And the editing conventions in A Mile Down I think fit for nonfiction. I use quotes in my nonfiction but not in my fiction.

19. Thanks, Sean. I did really like Seref, and I don’t know whether he’s read it. He wanted an extra $90,000 in ‘tip’ for the boat, so we had a falling out…

20. Hi David, I wanted to thank you for a great reading in the draughty barn in Sussex, England, last September. I was gripped again by stories that I already loved! I just wondered whether you had anything to say about the ‘page’ as against the ‘stage’? In other words, what would be your advice to writers about reading their work in public? Thank you

21. But generally I don’t research fiction. I did spend two weeks in Alaska summer of 09 to check things for Caribou. So I do fact-checking. But I love that fiction can take off on its own and doesn’t have to come from research. I am impressed by writers who do historical research, and I may still write that one in Anglo-Saxon England. I’ve already read a lot of that history and studied the language, but I’d no doubt need to do more research.

22. I have a nonfiction book about a school shooting coming out in October (being published only in the US, again a contest, again something that my agents didn’t think could sell), and I did a lot of research for that, 3 months of interviews and was lucky to be the only one to gain access to the full 1500 page police file with all the shooter’s emails, mental health history, etc…

23. Just reposting this David in case it didn’t show up at your end:

    In A Mile Down, was the decision to use more conventional formatting — e.g. inverted commas for the speech, a more direect, conversational voice — your decision or your publisher’s?

    And has Seref ever read it? Your portrayal of him is memorable — he comes across as a decent guy in his own way, despite the major problems he caused you.

24. The best part about the tours are the festivals, by the way, and meeting other authors there, such as you and Colm Toibin and Hanif Kureishi, Byatt, Hornby, etc. That’s been fantastic.

25. Hi David – This kind of follows on from my first question – have you ever had to wrangle with research for your writing, or is it something you mostly keep clear of? By research I don’t mean academic/critical, but more the sort of background preparation that you might turn to for writing about Anglo-Saxon England …

26. At the moment, I am finding it a bit tough to revise a novel while I teach and tour and do interviews, but it’s been a thrill, all of it, and I think the key is to just let publicists know that for the most part the mornings have to be reserved for writing.

27. Hi Tania,
    I love all the touring and interviews. The books are coming out in 16 languages now, and with each new launch, I feel like I get a new life along with the book’s new life…

28. Hi David, how are you? It was me in this hot-seat last month! Just wanted to ask, since we recently met up when you were doing a reading, how do the book tour and all the other aspects of being a published author interfere or enhance your writing life?

29. I think the quote from Hanif is perfect. I think writing does exactly that, except that I would emphasize that the taking control happens in an out of control way, unconsciously.

30. Lucy Boyce has written in with a question. She asks: Hanif Kureishi, in his essay ‘Something Given: Reflections of Writing’, talks of writing as an active way of taking possession of the world, a way of processing and ordering what seemed like chaos. Do you feel this is true of your own desire to write?

31. When I’m writing, though, I don’t focus on craft or structure or framing, etc. I think we study style, etc. and then that increases our competence and hopefully comes out in our performance when we write, but I don’t think it’s a generative point of focus while writing.

32. What’s a bit different in Transmission is that it tends a tad toward metafiction, with the overwriting of the myth of how the grandfather first sees the grandmother, so we’re aware of the attempt to construct stories that make sense…

33. Those two stories are similar in that the protagonist is trying to understand and see another person clearly and ends up not fully able to do that but catches glimpses…

34. Transmission is a gorgeous story. I see it as being, perhaps in contrast to Rhoda, a story about the gaining of sight, or rather insight. The framing of this story, through various windows, is interesting and makes me wonder if narrative framing something that you focus on when writing, or would you say this is more part of the unconscious patterning that you mentioned earlier?

    Thanks, Hayley.

35. My real stepmother is neither of the Rhodas but is the inspiration for them, and they change shape to fit the stories, just as the real events have transformed into something else. What I’m interested in is how the unconscious reshapes and redeems the ugliest stories from my real life, and I think it’s interesting to know the real stories in the background so that you, as readers, can see the transformations that I’ve seen as the writer. What the fiction does is real and amazing, I think.

36. Good question, Hayley. I used the real names as place markers for the true stories that I’m mining. Since the murder-suicide of my stepmother’s parents is in the background of Caribou Island, and she was named Rhoda in the stories, I kept the name, even though she’s a different character here…

37. Hi David,

    I’m interested in the re-use of character names through your short fiction and in Caribou Island. Here I am thinking about Gary and Rhoda.

    This is a lovely device as it creates a sense of echo and reprise, but it also made me feel that there is an element of autobiography in your work. Is that correct, and if not, what are your motives for this?

    Thanks, Hayley.

38. And people have told me for a long time to quit writing about my dad, or to quit writing about suicide (there are other family suicides in the background of Caribou Island). So I personally think they should all fuck off. It was the most important event in my life, and I’m going to talk about it, and there’ll probably always be some bit of it in the background, and if I want to write 16 books about it, I can. That said, my next novel is in California and doesn’t have suicide and is about my mom’s family. But I don’t think writers get to pick their material, and I don’t think writers should ever have to apologize, and I think anyone should feel free to discuss suicide or mental illness, and I think discussion only helps.

39. Thanks, Yvonne. There is so much shame around suicide. For 3 years, I told everyone my father died of cancer…

40. I should add, on Katherine’s question, that I do think we can teach a lot about reading, and I use a background in linguistics, primarily, for the tools to talk about style.

41. Hi David,
    My father killed himself and for some time afterward I was encourage not to mention the ‘skeleton in the closet’. My father suffered with schizophrenia, an illness that often involves suicide. I was frustrated by the idea that had my father died of cancer or a car accident then I could talk about it, but that he killed himself as a result of schizophrenia, I mustn’t. Was your intention in writing Legend of a Suicide to challenge the collective shame and silence of such events? What did you want to achieve in writing the book?
    Yvonne

42. I wouldn’t consider self-publishing. No one views it as real (universities or the publishing world). There are exceptions, such as Fup, that go on and have commercial lives, but those are really exceptions. Better to wait, I think, and enter contests.

43. David,
    If you hadn’t found a publisher for Legend, would you have consider self-publishing it? It’s a question I ask myself too. Thanks!

44. But finally, you can’t make a student write something that matters, and you can’t give them talent, and you aren’t really their teacher anyway. Only great works that they love and ingest can help them cross over into something good.

45. And I also do exercises that break students out of their habits, such as writing without the letter e, using verbs only in the second half of sentences, using all nouns, adjs, and verbs outside their usual part of speech, etc…

46. And I try to get students to think of their writing over a longer span, not for the semester. And I try to make the point that finding the right material, the story you really need to be telling, is important. Many students are afraid of offending family, etc., and I let them know that family has to be sacrificed…

47. To begin with, in my classes I set up a bunch of rules for how fiction works, going through examples, then give a bunch of examples that break the rules…

48. Great question, Katherine, and tough to answer, but I’ll try…

49. Hi David – I enjoyed your recent interview for The White Review, and was interested that you said writing is a completely unconscious process for you … I know you also teach creative writing. Given that there’s a danger that CW students can become far too conscious of their process and self-conscious about their writing, do you have any words of wisdom for avoiding that?

    Thanks!

50. I’ve already had the bio question, actually, responses above.

51. David,
    Having read Legend of a suicide, I was intrigued by the amount of biographical content. I too use a lot of my personal experience in my writing and I was wondering how do you manage to balance the autobiographical content of your stories with the ‘more fictional’ aspects? How do you know where to stop?

52. Thanks, Dora. I started writing Caribou Island when I finished Legend, but I got stuck at 48 pages and couldn’t see the longer arc or whose story it was. That was 14 years ago. Then 2 years ago, I was walking around on the frozen lake in Alaska where the novel is set and could suddenly see Irene’s winter vision (which occurs late, on something like page 253). And I could see it was Irene’s story. So I hopped on the five and a half month momentum train and had my first draft of Caribou.
    I didn’t revise any of the stories in Legend after I finished. They just sat and waited.

53. Thank you for taking the time for being with us! I am stunned by your writing. It so visceral and real. I can see the characters in front of me and I can only hope I can achieve such a feat. I read that your short stories languished for over 12 years before winning the Grace Paley award. Did you keep revising them in the interim or worked on other projects?

54. As I’ve mentioned in interviews, I think an idea is the worst thing that can happen to a writer. Ideas constrain and limit and ultimately suck.

55. I think the melodramatic is probably planned, based on an idea. That would be my guess.

56. The boy’s suicide was something I didn’t see coming until halfway through the sentence, so I had no idea what would follow in the rest of the short novel. I hadn’t planned on writing from the father’s pov. So everything came out darker and far more odd than I had ever imagined. That was the unconscious taking over. A kind of revenge story, and odd dark humor, etc.

57. Great question, Rik. I just had no idea that scene was coming. I was horrified after I wrote it…

58. We were actually discussing ‘Legend of a Suicide’ in our Lecture/Seminar today, and conversation got around to the atmosphere you create when describing the dead body in a bag, and the fathers reaction. Whilst many writers try to set up such an intense scene, they usually fall short, and end up making it incredibly mellow-dramatic, however they way you’ve done it left me feeling both satisfied (because the scene is so perfect) yet nauseated (because the scene is so perfect!) at the same time. What’s your secret to not selling such an utterly intense scene short by over-dramatising it? Thanks!

59. And that’s why momentum is so important, for cohesion, so it all feels of one piece.

60. I should also say that my final drafts are almost identical to my first drafts. Ichthyology had one paragraph cut and one added. Caribou Island had only a few paragraphs of background info added, and line edits. I was always told writing is mostly revision, but for me, the work lives or dies in the first draft.

61. The impulsive part is that I never know what I’m going to write about. I had plans this last summer to write a novel set in Anglo-Saxon England, then one morning I just started writing a novel set in California in 1985, and that’s what I worked on every day for the next five and a half months until I had a first draft…

62. I now write every morning for 2 or 3 hours, 7 days a week, and the writing is all about momentum for me. Those unconscious patterns only happen if there’s no interruption. It’s important to not miss a single day until I have a first draft. Then I can relax a bit in revision…

63. Hi David, I hope this comment appears in an orderly place, and doesn’t come out like an interruption! I wanted to ask about your writing process, are you a methodical or an impulsive writer? Are you good at sticking to a “routine” for working?

64. I also went to sea and started a new career as a captain, which worked out really well, ha.

65. I realized, in retrospect, that I should have been more persistent in sending out the manuscript. I just believed what everyone said in the rejections, and I should have maybe not believed. I recommend sending out to contests. That was how it finally got published. And I have to thank AWP and UMass Press for that.

66. Ha. I didn’t keep the faith. I was a big baby and didn’t write for five and a half years. I really showed the world, and the world suffered mightily from missing those years of my writing…

67. Hi David,

    I’m a big fan of your work. I was amazed at how long Legend took – both in terms of writing and then finding a publisher. It must have been a very frustrating and difficult process. How did you manage to keep the faith during all that time?

    Best,
    Sean
    Edinburgh.

68. I think writing does something real in transforming the content of our lives, and that it can’t be faked. I don’t think we really pick our material in that way.

69. I think it’s important to eliminate the incidental from true material. I think short stories are paranoid worlds in which everything means. So I try to move the story to a different location or time or different people to give it more room to take off on its own.

70. I use true stories to power the fiction emotionally and psychologically, but I rely on the writing to surprise and head off in its own direction. I believe writing is mostly unconscious and out of control that way, and I’m amazed by how coherent these unconscious patterns can be…

71. David,
    Having read Legend of a suicide, I was intrigued by the amount of biographical content. I too use a lot of my personal experience in my writing and I was wondering how do you manage to balance the autobiographical content of your stories with the ‘more fictional’ aspects? How do you know where to stop?

72. I’m coming. Just got back up online…

73. Each of the stories is in a different style, and Rhoda is the minimalist story.

74. I also thought that minimalism was the right form for limited sight into sexuality.

75. Great question, Will, and thanks for the careful read. Her impairment was the starting point. I was sitting in a cemetary on the hill at Cornell, in upstate New York, and a woman came by with a young daughter who had an eye like that, and it seemed perfect for how the boy can’t fully see into adulthood or sexuality or the rel’p between his father and stepmother or who either of them are.

76. Hi David, I loved reading your story ‘Rhoda’ and wanted to ask you about it. It seems to me a story about sight in many respects. Characters have varying degrees of clarity in their ability to see those around them. Not just each other physically through visual imagery, but in terms of reflection, emotion, looking ahead to their individual and collective futures…They don’t seem to be able to see themselves with as much clarity either. Rhoda’s physical impairment allows her to see herself and how others see her in a more specific way than the others. For me, this is how I read the story and it enhanced my enjoyment of it. My question is, was Rhoda’s physical impairment a starting point for you symbolically, or was the narrator and his voice a starting point – an almost naive observer of those around him? Thank you…

77. I guess I should add that I think of Legend personally as a short novel framed by five stories, which is kind of a mouthful.

78. The Things They Carried and other books are like that, and I think ‘linked story collection’ works as a term, but it probably sounds like a nightmare to a sales team. I’m very happy with how Penguin published it, and I think how they presented it is fair.

79. So the title, Legend of a Suicide, means a series of portraits of a suicide, which fits the fact that none of us in the family could agree on one true story. But the result is not really a story collection or a novel, so I liked the idea of just not calling it anything…

80. But then I saw it could fit with the other stories. I was reading Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, and wrote the story “A Legend of Good Men,” using the structure of a series of portraits, from the hagiographic tradition. Then I saw this could be applied to the collection overall…

81. I wrote Sukkwan Island to stand on its own, as a novel (which is how it’s published in French, German, Spanish, Italian, etc.)..;.

82. Do you consider Legend of a Suicide a novel or a short story collection. It is marketed as a novel but is this the best way to think of it in terms of reader expectation and was it the decision of the publisher rather than the idea you had of it when you set out to write it? I really don’t see the problem with a collection, interlinked stories seem to be all the rage but publishers are nervous of them – maybe we need a new category!

83. Questions are mounting up, but before we get started, I’d like to remind everyone out there in Cyberspace, watching or taking part in this session, that you’ll need to hit your REFRESH button every now and then to make sure you don’t miss anything. Formalities over with, let’s get started… Here’s your first question, David.

84. Thanks, Loree. I’m looking forward to this.

85. Hello Everyone. I think we’re ready to get things underway…

    David, I’d like to say how pleased we are to have you with us, tonight. I know you’re very busy at the moment, with the recent launch of Caribou Island and what seems to have been a global book tour, so we feel very privileged to have you here with us at THRESHOLDS.

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