Interview with Alan DeNiro

The following is an interview with Alan DeNiro, author of two chapbooks of poetry:  The Black Hare and Atari Ecologues, as well as a collection of short stories, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead (Small Beer Press, 2006).

Dan:

Thank you, Alan, for taking some time from your schedule to answer some questions.

Alan:

No problem!

Dan:

You attended Catholic school for 12 years – I’m assuming 1st grade through graduation.  Have you determined if, and if yes, how, those years may have had an effect on the way you write?

Alan:

Yes – a huge effect.  It gave me a cosmology and belief system to work with, and later, work against to an extent.  I still feel “culturally Catholic” in spirit, in a lot of the ways I approach looking at aesthetic issues of politics (e.g., the storytelling of the saints’ lives).  I also have written a lot about people grappling with religious experiences – and there are no easy answers to such things.  Growing up, I really did believe.

Dan:

You received you BA in English from College of Wooster and then your MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia.  Did you go right from Wooster to the MFA program, or was there any time spent out of school in between?

Alan:

I went straight through.  Definitely a different experience than most of my colleagues, who were generally older.

Dan:

Your most recent published book is a collection of stories, and per your website, you’ve published many more than are included in this book.  Did you also take any fiction classes during your MFA program, or just poetry?

Alan:

No, but I took a literature class with Deborah Eisenberg in my second year of the program, and that had a huge, huge impact on me and what kind of fiction I’d write eventually.  It was a class where we all got together in a big room in that house that she was renting while she taught at UVA – and there had to have been about 40 people in the class, just crammed into this living room-type-area – and talked about short stories that we were assigned.  We’d go sentence by sentence.  Digging into the craft that way, and the larger themes of stories like “Sonny’s blues” and Gogol’s “The Overcoat” was just an incredible experience.  She really showed me, in a way I hadn’t seen before, how the short story can be this incandescent art form…which is obviously embodied in the stories that she writes as well.

Dan:

You published a couple of chapbooks of poetry?  Were those through contests, or publishers that you noted having something in common with their previous catalogues?  How did the two books come about?

Alan:

The Black Hare came about through this wonderful little press in Chicago called A Small Garlic Press.  It was great working with them.  (The book is the first third of my graduate thesis, a book length poem called “Hinterlands.”)  Atari Ecologues was a sequence I decided to publish myself.  Nothing fancy – but I was pretty happy the way it turned out.  So no, no contests.

Dan:

With Kelly and Gavin at Small Beer Press, it appears from reading some blogs, etc. that you are not just in a Publisher/Author relationship, but that these folks are your friends as well.  Is that something you would recommend to other authors (and publishers) in the future, or are there issues and decisions that might tax a friendship if it’s not a real solid one?

Alan:

What I do recommend is finding a community, of some sort, in which to nurture one’s writing and reading, and going from there.  For me it was Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention held in Madison every Memorial Day weekend.  The genre zine culture really flourished there (still does), and my wife and I met some dear, dear friends there.  And will continue to!  Then:  what happens?  Maybe publishing venues, maybe not.  But more important than that is having compatriots.  The best advice (not that I’m not still learning tons) I can give to a writer starting out is not to “play the angles” when going to a writing conference of convention.  If you start treating other writers or editors as something other than people, as opposed to career stepladders, then you’re fucked, even if you somehow manage to “get ahead”, whatever that means.  Because in the ende, you’ll never be happy that way.  Just be yourself.

Dan:

You are married to another writer, correct?  How does that work for the two of you?  Separate offices – share an office, but write at different times?  Are you each other’s first readers?

Alan:

It’s great – we actually met at a 6 week SF/F writing workshop called Clarion – and we are definitely each other’s first readers.  Our stuff is pretty different in sensibility, so we each can look at each other’s stuff from a “slant” perspective, which is incredibly helpful.  I feel lucky to be able to read Kristin’s stories in their earlier incarnations;  they are great.  We each have separate writing spaces, but we go out to a coffee shop and work together when we can.

Dan:

You’ve been blogging since 2002 – is there an overriding purpose to your blogging?  Is it meant to be a journal – a record of your thoughts – a place to promote your work – or anything else specifically?  Or just a little more procrastination?

Alan:

Well, it started as a parody of a blog.  Go to my categories and read the posts under “Evening and Quail”.  Those were my fictional roommates.  It was fun for a few months, then I wrote myself in a corner and it kind of mutated into a blog blog.  It’s now a little bit of everything, skimming the line between a journal of thoughts, news about my life and writing life, and finally ruminations about literature and politics.  I can’t say it’s any one thing.  Some months I blog a lot and others, not so much.  But I think the form is malleable enough to accommodate those different interests.

Dan:

I understand you are a big Garrison Keillor fan?

Alan:

Ha!  Seriously, I’ve been tough on my blog on some of the things he’s said.  But that, I have to admit, is partially mitigated by the fact that he’s opened an indie bookstore in St. Paul, Common Good Books.  That part of town desperately, desperately needs one (Micawber’s, which is amazing, is pretty much on the other end of the city.)

Dan:

What thoughts come to mind when the name Kevin McHale is mentioned?  And, do you miss Flip Saunders at all?

Alan:

I’m glad I get to talk about the Timberwolves – I so wish he was fired.  I can’t even take any joy in the draft this year, because I just know he’s going to screw it up somehow; or rather (unless we magically get pick #1 or 2), a top 10 pick really isn’t going to change the team’s caliber.  The team is saddled with miserable contracts.  I wish at this point (and it kills me to say this) that we’d trade KG and start over – what’s left to lose? – but Taylor and McHale have said no way, and I sadly believe them.  They are nothing if not stubborn.  Really, a comedy of errors.

Flip shouldn’t have been fired;  I think he landed in a good place and, after 10 years with the Timberwolves, it might have been time for a change anyway.  But, really, his situation was handled really poorly, which is no surprise really.

To the rest of the people reading this besides the 5 who know what the heck I’m talking about, or care, I say thank you.

Dan:

Then there’s music – in a bold move (one that I’d agree with), you stated that White Lion’s “Wait” should be viewed as a heavily overlooked pop gem.  Did you take much crap over that statement? 

Alan:

No one’s yet given me shit about my love of “Wait,” so that’s good.  Well, maybe my wife?

Dan:

I think a real tribute to your writing is the very wide variance in the types of literary journals that have published your work.  Is there a particular journal that you’ve not been published in yet that would just absolutely make your day to get an acceptance from?

Alan:

Not really, but I would love more general consumer magazines to publish fiction.  A special fiction issue of Model Railroading or Nintendo Power would be awesome.  I’m totally serious.

Dan:

I know they’re all your babies, but do you have one or two stories that you sit back and think to yourself, ‘Wow, I wrote that’?

Alan:

Oh yeah, but usually it involves stories that are pretty weird that really haven’t seen the light of day yet.  I have this one science fiction story that I haven’t been able to finish yet where a man kidnaps a sentient desk.  Cue:  “Wow, I wrote that?”

Dan:

You have a new work, a poem, that is in excess of one hundred pages in length.  Is this out being shopped for a book deal anywhere?

Alan:

I think “poetry book deal” is an oxymoron.  But I really haven’t sent it to contests either.  Which (as might be evident from my previous answer about the chapbooks) I’m not a huge fan of.  I think at some point I’m going to release it free on the Internets with a Creative Commons license that would allow anyone to sample from it, as long as there’s attribution.  Just to give people more than one way to read the poem; if they want to treat it as a mammoth language-carcass to pick through, that’s fine by me.

Dan:

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

Alan:

Probably a poem or two by J.H. Prynne, who (this year, anyway) is my favorite poet.

Dan:

Thanks again, Alan, for taking some time to answer these questions.

Alan:

Thank you, Dan!

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