LBC Interview: Marshall N. Klimasewiski

The following is an interview with Marshall N. Klimasewiski, author of The Cottagers (Norton, 2005).  He currently is a Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dan:

Thank you Marshall, for taking some time out of this near the end of the semester craze to answer some questions.

Marshall:

My pleasure.  Thanks for the questions.

Dan:

Were you a big reader as a youngster?  Is there an incident from your youth that you recall that might have been the spark towards your becoming a writer?

Marshall:

I wasn’t a big reader, compared to other writer friends I have.  I always had deep attachments to certain books—that old, red-covered volume of Winnie-the-Pooh first, then The Lorax, then From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler—but I don’t think I read especially widely, for a kid.  But yes, I also had a third grade teacher who gave us an assignment to write a story, and who then typed up and mimeographed the story I turned in, passed it out to the class, and read it aloud.  I’ve always said I decided I’d be a writer at that moment, while her voice enunciated my sentences, and I think it’s really true, even though I went through long stretches of my youth neither writing nor reading much.  It was as if I’d secured a future that didn’t require my present—as if I’d decided I would be a doctor when I grew up.  But then I did only apply to undergraduate colleges that offered creative writing as a major, and not surprisingly, I arrived at mine (Carnegie Mellon) a truly awful writer.  I still remember a couple of my teachers there having a good, long laugh together, one day when I was a senior on the verge of graduating, about just how bad I was when they first saw me—they could recall in detail my early poems and stories, and quoting them still brought tears to their eyes.

Dan:

Besides reading and writing, what aspects of pop culture (if any) grab much of your attention?  For instance, growing up in Harford, CT, were you by chance a Whalers fan?

Marshall:

Ah, the Whalers—you couldn’t avoid them.  And in my youth, coaches Calhoun and Auriemma hadn’t yet arrived so UCONN basketball was nothing, making the Whalers all we had to cling to.  I was (and remain) a huge sports fan, though hockey wasn’t a favorite.  Last summer a writer for The New York Times traveled around Connecticut, interviewing people and visiting sports bars, trying to trace out the border where Yankee territory gave way to Red Sox nation, and my town was right on that line.  Because my family was full of Red Sox fans (well, mostly—my mom had a crush on Mickey Mantle), I became a dire Yankee fan.  I had a poster of Thurman Munson in my bedroom (and his was my first experience of death).  I remain one, too.  Sorry.  Though with how much better your Tigers have been lately I have nothing to be sorry about.  I do love pop music, too—sometimes write while listening to it.

Dan:

Your debut novel, The Cottagers, came out last year.  How much reviewing attention did it receive?  Was it about what you expected, or a surprising amount (in either direction)?

Marshall:

It was really distressing at first, because there was virtually no attention at all for many weeks.  It had gotten a decent PW review, and a not-great one from Kirkus, but when it was out, nothing.  After about two months the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reviewed it, and at about three months, within maybe a two week span, there were better reviews from Esquire, The LA Times, and then the Sunday NY Times.  That all came as a huge relief, because I had already resigned myself to having put out one of those books (I’d had friends with them) that slip between the cracks and simply disappear.  And frankly, in the end, that was as much review attention as I’d hoped for with a novel like mine.  My son was born the same week the novel came out, and that really helped:  all through those quiet months, I simply didn’t have the time or energy to bathetically obsess over my utter anonymity the way I surely would have without him.

Dan:

I noticed that the NY Times listed it as an Editor’s Choice – did you (or your agent perhaps) notice any bump in sales after that announcement?  Or for any reviews for that matter, be they print or online?

Marshall:

You know, I just don’t know how to keep track of sales well enough to tell things like that.  And I love my agent, but she’s not really the type to track a book that way either (which I don’t mind).  But I do know that Norton called to say they would put out the paperback of the novel about two days after the NY Times review, and I hadn’t heard from them at all in many weeks at that point.  It was a two-book deal, but before that little clutch of reviews I wonder if they might have canceled the second book (much less a paperback of the novel).  Or maybe I’m just being a paranoid author.

Dan:

What is your take on the reduction in newspaper book pages across the country these days?

Marshall:

Sadness and dismay.  The usual.  They’re my favorite part of any paper (well, maybe the sports pages).  And I’ve lived in places—Portland, for instance—where they contribute beautifully toward creating a thriving local book culture.  The success of outlets like Amazon and Borders set against that trend seems so odd to me.  And what about all these book clubs and reading groups?  Where will they find their books, and why isn’t their proliferation keeping those sections popular?  But of course I fear—like everyone—we may be seeing the final days of newspapers in general.

Dan:

Even though the book flap and blurbs announce it as such, I was still surprised by the level of suspense felt while reading The Cottagers.  Did you fully intend to write this particular novel when you started out, or did it develop into the suspense driven drama through the writing?

Marshall:

No, I’ve never fully intended anything I’ve written.  I’m definitely a driving-at-night sort of writer:  can only see as far as the cast of the headlights.  And I didn’t intend to write a suspenseful book, although I agree with everything others have said on the LBC site:  I love suspense, though it’s never enough on its own for me, and its promise is never what will get me to a book.  But you know, I’m glad to hear that mine is suspenseful, and I’m still a little surprised when people find it particularly so since of course there’s only brief (and limited) doubt about who killed poor Nicholas.  Happily surprised, since suspense was never a high priority for me while writing.

Dan:

You were out and about doing some readings, I know you were invited to read in the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  Do you like to give readings?  Do you have any preference for their locations when you do give them?  Bookstores, universities, libraries, or bars even?

Marshall:

I sometimes like to have given a reading.  There’s so much more adrenalin involved there than at the desk, and it’s great when you feel like you’ve actually spoken aloud what you heard in your head.  I guess I do like giving readings, although I feel like it has so little to do with writing (I’m more an alone-under-lamplight than aloud-and-together lover of literature, as consumer as well as producer).  And I’ve enjoyed the very different feel of reading in a bar as opposed to a university hall or a library—I like that range—but I don’t know that I have a preference.  It was great being at Michigan, though—so many warm people there, among the faculty and students, both.

Dan:

You’ve also published many short stories, including seeing them in such journals as Ploughshares, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.  Do you prefer writing novels to short stories, or vice versa?  What, to you, are the biggest similarities and the biggest differences in sitting down to each?

Marshall:

So far, I seem to like writing both equally well (or dislike them equally, more often).  For me, the main technical difference is simply plot—you can get away with so little of it in a story, of course, and I’m not a writer who naturally thinks in well-plotted structures.  It’s something I usually have to impose.  But on a more impressionistic level, the big difference for me is simply that once I get past a certain number of pages and parallel promises waiting to be kept, I can’t hold a whole novel in my head at once.  I can’t sit down at the desk and hold it at arm’s length and reconsider the entire weave before getting my fingers wrapped up in the two or three threads at hand that day—the way I work on a story.  And I find that very difficult, especially since when I write novels, for some reason, I’ve always been drawn to material that involves the juxtaposition and association of fairly disparate elements—connections that feel as if they won’t be made outside of a novel version of the world—but my sense of composition, frankly, isn’t always up to pulling off such a collage.  So The Cottagers was the fourth novel I started and got a good distance into, and all three of the others essentially died by falling into pieces that couldn’t be satisfactorily stitched together.  The various points of view in The Cottagers allowed me to work that way still, to some extent, but at least this time all the people were in the same setting, encountering one another and the same events, etc.

Dan:

Your work has also been included in Best American Short Stories, I believe the first time was in 1992 for the story "Jun Hee."  What extra bit of satisfaction do you feel as the author of a story that gets included in such an anthology?

Marshall:

The only time.  Oh, I was so young, Dan—25 when that happened (that was also the story that was in The New Yorker) and just a year out of an MFA program.  You know, I thought:  well here I am.  Look at me.  Move over, Cheever.  I wasn’t stupid enough not to know I was lucky, and I was immensely satisfied, but truthfully, it wasn’t good for my writing.  It was too much too soon, and I had just been lucky with that story.  Lucky in two ways:  it was a better story than anything else I’d written then, but also there is simply so much luck built into all the layers of the publishing world, in my experience—only a few years later I remember re-reading that story and being appalled.  It wasn’t good at all, and certainly hadn’t deserved that level of validation.  I’m including it in my collection, but I had to revise it a lot to do that, and even so, I’ll include it there not so much because I still think well of it as because I feel like that collection is, for better or worse, something of a record of my development as a writer.  But for a good couple of years after that success (still the high point of “exposure” for me as a writer, as perhaps it always will be), I couldn’t write anything without comparing it to “Jun Hee” or thinking about whether my editor at The New Yorker (who has long since moved on) would like it, and so I didn’t write much.  All the time I wasted thinking of that silly story as a benchmark of some kind.  But I probably wouldn’t have written much good fiction in those years in any case (I really was still figuring too much out), and those credits still look kind of nice in an author’s note.

Dan:

You have a collection, Tyrants, due to be published.  Is there a timeline for that yet?  I read 2006 online somewhere (maybe the WUSTL page) but do not see anything on Amazon about it coming out.

Marshall:

Yes, it’s coming out in February (2008).  Thanks for asking.

Dan:

The Cottagers will be coming out in paperback next month – will you be going back out to support it doing readings and the like?

Marshall:

Well, Norton won’t be sending me out or anything.  I’ll happily go anywhere if I’m invited.

Dan:

You teach at Washington University in St. Louis, making it quite possibly the first writing program with two teachers having been nominated for the LBC Read This! Program (though I’ve not truly researched this), along with Kellie Wells.  How did you come to find yourself teaching in the middle of the country (having grown up in Connecticut)?

Marshall:

You know, the job was available when I was on the market, first of all.  It was a program I was familiar with—I knew they’d had a good MFA going here for years—and I love the work of Stanley Elkin and William Gass.  It was exciting to get to teach in their wake.  When I arrived, there was only one other fiction writer—Charles Newman—who just taught one semester a year.  But I really liked (still like) everyone in the English Department, and I liked that they’d let me teach literature—craft classes—as well as workshops.  So I felt very fortunate to land here.  Since then, yeah, Kellie Wells and Kathryn Davis have joined the program, and they’re both terrific people and good friends in addition to being writers I really admire.  I think we’re all proud that we’ve kept Wash U something of a home for the kind of non-traditional narrative that Elkin and Gass made it known for (though my work is probably the most traditional of the three).  And it’s taken a while, but my wife and I feel ourselves settling into the city, and certain aspects of being Midwesterners, more every year.  The fact that we still pine for places like Boston or Seattle sometimes seems to have less and less to do with any dissatisfaction with Saint Louis.  We like it here.

Dan:

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

Marshall:

Oh—isn’t that nice to think about.  Probably Melville—passages of Moby Dick.  (Bradbury probably has a character in the book quoting Ishmael among the trees?  I haven’t read it since high school.)  And Henry Green.  I think some of those dialogues—from Loving, or Nothing, or Doting—would be weirdly sustaining, with their mix of wit, longing, and existential emptiness (I’ve always found depressing literature the most uplifting).  Aren’t Elizabeth Bowen’s sentences and paragraphs often gorgeous?  I’d try to hold on to all of “In the Ravine” too.

Dan:

Thanks again for taking the time to answer these questions.

Marshall:

Thank you, Dan—very much.

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