Interview with Yannick Murphy

The following is an interview with Yannick Murphy, author of the short story collection, Stories in Another Language (Knopf, 1987), the NY Times Notable novel, The Sea of Trees (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997), and the novel, Here They Come (McSweeney’s, 2006), not to mention the forthcoming children’s book, Ahwoooooooo!.  She currently lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband and three children.

Dan:

Hello Yannick.  Thank you for taking some time away from your day to answer some questions.

Yannick:

Dan, thank you.  I think it's great that you publish these interviews with lesser-known authors like myself.  I really appreciate it.

Dan:

I see that there’s been nearly a decade span between each of your three non-children titles.  Does this indicate slow writing?  Or difficulty finding publishers?  Or something else altogether?

Yannick:

Never slow writing, I actually write pretty quickly.  But for a while there it was an agent who was slowing me down.  I had a very reputable agent for "The Sea of Trees" and every subsequent book I showed her she thought should be re-written a certain way before she sent it out to publishers.  When I showed her "Here They Come" she thought that what should be fleshed out in the story was the relationship between the narrator and her friend Rena.  (She was also concerned about the amount of "human detritus" I included in the book).  It was not a direction I was comfortable going in, so instead of re-writing it her way, I shelved "Here They Come" for a long time.  Meanwhile, I wrote other novels which my then agent still thought should be written different ways.  Finally I reached up and took "Here They Come" down off the shelf and re-read it and decided that I really wanted to see it published.  I think I even told my husband something stupid like, "Honey, before I die, I want to see this book published."  Anyway, I decided to leave this prestigious agent that no one ever left and go in search of another agent.  I finally found Judy Heiblum who fell in love with "Here They Come" and was game enough to send it out.

Dan:

It’s not too difficult to find an article these days proclaiming how difficult it is to sell a story collection, especially without a novel to go along with it.  However, your first book was a collection of stories.  Was the market better for such collections 20 years ago than it is today?

Yannick:

Well, I think there was more of a market for any kind of fiction twenty years ago than there is today, but my case was a little unusual.  My editor was Gordon Lish at Knopf and I knew him because I was studying with him at NYU.  He was notorious for giving short story authors their first break, for example he published Amy Hempel's first collection, but Knopf only let him publish these authors if he paid them a really piddly sum, so I fell into that group of authors.  It was just luck.  I don't think that anyone else would have published my short story collection twenty years ago, and I really don't think anyone would publish it today.

Dan:

Even though you have not published another collection since then, you have had at least a couple of stories published recently – do you still write stories on a regular basis?  Do you write them while in the middle of writing a novel?

Yannick:

Yes, you're exactly right,  I publish them in between writing novels.  I still love short stories.  With them, you get in and you get out.  There's a beauty to them that I'll always be attracted to. I think the reader allows you a little more play in  short stories because the reader knows you've only got a certain number of pages to do your thing, so you can show your playful side to a reader and they accept it a little more easily, it's part of the un-spoken conversation between you and the reader.

Dan:

Your first novel, The Sea of Trees, was a New York Times Notable title.  Were you able to notice any benefits from this acknowledgement?  Boost in sales?  More favorable reviews?  Interest in your work in progress at the time?

Yannick: 

Yikes, I don't think it did anything for me.  It might have impressed a few agents, and maybe, initially, a few editors, but when it came right down to publisher's making a decision about the next book they were mostly concerned with the number of sales that "The Sea of Trees" had.

Dan:

Your next book was published 9 years later.  Had there been any pressure on you to strike while the iron was hot after The Sea of Trees was acknowledged by the Times? 

Yannick: 

If there was any pressure on me, I put it on myself.  But I didn't write another book any faster than I normally would have, I think I just worried more.

Dan:

I’ve not had the pleasure of tracking down and reading these past works yet, but found Here They Come to be a pretty hypnotic read – one of those open it up and hours later set it down completed titles.  I understand that Here They Come contains copious amounts of autobiographical material.  Did your previous books mine that territory as well?

Yannick:

In the short stories there were definitely snippets of my life in each of them.  I find it difficult to write without some kernel of a true experience or a person from my life in mind.  In "The Sea of Trees" I imagined I was my mother writing the story of her life.  My connection with my mother was great enough for me to place myself in her shoes.  I wouldn't have chosen to write about a girl growing up in a concentration camp otherwise, it wouldn't have interested me unless I knew the characters involved.

Dan:

Your previous titles were published by Knopf and Houghton-Mifflin.  The new one was by McSweeney’s.  What sort of differences did you find in the various experiences with that trio?

Yannick:

Well, there's always a difference with the editors.  My first editor, Gordon Lish, worked very closely with me on my collection, but he had also been my teacher, so I knew what to expect from him. I knew what his style was.  He would sit me down next to him on his couch in his office and he would get out his pen and together we'd look at the work, page by page, line by line, word by word, syllable by syllable.  On the other hand, when I worked on "The Sea of Trees" with my editor at Houghton Mifflin, it was very different.  At first, I was very excited to have a new editor.  I waited patiently at home for her first phone call to me.  I thought of all the things she might possibly bring up that may have needed fixing in the book.  Well, the phone rang and she said, "It's perfect, I really don't have any edits at all."  And that was it.  I hung up the phone.  I said to myself, "Wow, I'm perfect.  The book's perfect!"  Then I became sad.  I really enjoy working with editors who know what they're doing.  I really believe you can make the book a better object than it already is, that there's always room for that, so it can be in the best shape possible, so that it achieves something surreal, like the book itself is so good that the power of the words lift themselves right up off the page.  I wanted that to happen with this editor.  But she was not that kind of editor. With "Here They Come" I was able to re-new my faith in editors.  Eli Horowitz was great.  He worked very closely with me on the book, always looking for an opportunity to make it better.  At first we looked at it in the broad sense, and then of course in the more detailed sense.  He has a very relaxed manner, but his perception of good writing is as tight and professional as can be.

Dan:

The cover for Here They Come is fantastic.  How involved were you in the development of it?

Yannick:

Rachell Sumpter did the cover.  She is fantastic.  My editor would send me various illustrations she had done and then we'd email back and forth and figure out which one worked the best.  But that was a really difficult decision because all of her illustrations were so imaginative and beautiful.  She had this one illustration of a girl under water with her hair streaming behind her and caught up and woven in her hair was the mane of a horse and the image of the horse's head. There was also an illustration of a parade of hot dog men pushing their carts in front of a building, that was also great.  In the end, we decided on the cover we have, but I was a part of the decision making process right down to the blue and brown color scheme we chose for it.  It was a lot of fun being a part of the experience.  McSweeney's is smart, they know that's how it should be when a book gets published.

Dan:

Next month sees the publication of a book for children, Ahwoooooooo!  What led you to decide to write a book for the younger set?

Yannick:

I have three kids and I see a lot of bad children's books out there.  Bad maybe isn't the right word, I think that too many kids books try and tell kids how to feel, or the morals they should have, it's almost as if they're written for the parents instead - so that the parents can sit and read the book to the kid and then sit back and say to themselves, "Well, there, now little Johnny has learned what it means to be a good boy and I feel better about myself because I read this very instructional picture book to him".  I wanted to try and write a book that was written so that children could relate to a character and get meaning from the actions of the character, rather than how the character states he feels.

Dan:

How did you decide that Ahwoooooooo! would have 8 o’s?

Yannick:

I don't know how, I think I let my finger rest on the "o" on the key pad too long for a while there while I was busy daydreaming or picking my nose.

Dan:

You’ve received many awards throughout your career including a Whiting Writers Award, an NEA Award and the Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship, among others.  Are these more helpful to an author in the financial sense, or in the self-esteem sense?

Yannick:

Financially, yes they help a lot. But maybe, more importantly, they help because all of a sudden you're thrown from your little broken-springed chair at your messy desk into a world where people are recognizing you for what you love to do, and for a limited amount of time you're ecstatic because people want to talk to you about writing.  You get to hang out with other writers at the awards ceremony, or in the case of the Chesterfield fellowship, you get to hang out with them for a year and work together.  What you're doing right now, interviewing me is such a great thing because there aren't many other people I come into contact with on a daily basis who are interested in talking about all this stuff and it's tremendous fun for me.  It gets me all powered to write the next book, all powered up to sit alone at my broken springed chair at my messy desk again for another 9 or so years.

Dan:

Have you done much screenwriting?

Yannick:

In the Chesterfield fellowship I wrote a couple of screenplays.  Then, in the past years, I've written a couple of more.  Writing a screenplay can be great.  You've got to create a story using just images and dialogue.  I find that these restrictions are actually liberating and help me to be even more creative.  I guess I've been lucky though, my screenplays have never reached the point where anyone wanted to buy them.  I say this because I know that screenwriters are always disappointed when their screenplays, after they've been bought, are re-worked and re-written so much that their original state is barely recognizable.

Dan:

I see from your website (www.yannickmurphy.com) that you and the family are moving from Pasadena, CA to Reading, VT.  How much of a culture shock are you expecting that to be?

Yannick:

Not much of a culture shock.  I don't take advantage of that much culture here in Pasadena.  I'm pretty busy.  I don't even know my neighbors here in Pasadena, but I already know my neighbors there in VT.  I think it will be like going home, not to the home I had but to the home I wish I had growing up.  I like thinking that when my kids are bored I can tell them to go take a walk in the woods or go look for trout in the stream.  I can't let them play on the front lawn here because I'm sure child services would contact me telling me I was endangering their lives by having them play on the front lawn exposed to all the riff-raff who may come by and want to child-snatch them.  My kids, when they're older, can go live in a big city if they want to, and maybe it will be new and excitiing for them because they'll have grown up stoking a woodstove and sweeping ice of the pond for fun.  I think there's a trade off - I'll skip the museums, and I'll tend to my apple trees instead.  I'll know the deer I see out my bathroom window while I'm sitting on the throne.  I'll curse the snow that whops me on the head as it slides off the roof when I close the door behind me.  That's enough culture for me. 

Dan:

Lastly, if you were a character in “Fahrenheit 451,” what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Yannick:

Oh boy, let's see, is it possible to memorize "Les Miserables"?  No, way too long.  I don't think I can pronounce "Joubert" either. I better think of something a helluva lot shorter.

Dan:

Thanks again, Yannick.  I appreciate the time you’ve spent here.

Yannick:

Thank you, Dan.  It's been a pleasure.

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