Actors! They travel the world and all they see is a mirror.
If I don't read, I get lonely. If I don't write, I forget who I am.
Compassion is the belief that things might improve, and even when there's little, if anything, to sustain and engender that belief. It's the place from which I write, and the more troubled the circumstances, the deeper into the hearts and psyches of these characters I'm likely to go, opening every door in that dark hallway, and walking all the way in.
Once a poet always a poet, and even though I haven't written poems for a long time, I can nonetheless say that everything I've ever learned about writing lyrical fiction has been informed by three decades of writing in lines and stanzas. For me the real drama of fiction is almost always the drama of the language.
Jose Ortega y Gasset says, "Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are." Asserting that character/community is formed, at least in part, by the physical landscape in which he/she resides. And this is underscored by the fact - and not all that long ago - that people and place were, in fact, synonymous: Sapho of Lesbos, for example. Or my middle namesake, Saint Francis of Assisi. Jesus of Nazareth.
I am by nature not a list-keeper, but I do keep lists of names and add at least one or two every single day without exception. First names, last names, middle names, combinations of. I've collected more over the years than I can possibly ever use in a single lifetime, but I keep the list going nonetheless. I tell my students that it's a habit, an act of attention, that will keep them engaged, keep them thinking about characters and stories, and how that match might get made.
I can't really recreate or reconstruct exactly how or from where any of my characters originate, young or old, though chances are at least decent that once I name and begin to know them, young or old, I can then attempt to reveal each as psychologically complex and nuanced, and to speak through them, as William Matthews says, "What it feels like to be human."
I joke sometimes that I live a protracted adolescence, that a part of me will always be twelve years old.
As a writer, I find it a literal impossibility to disengage from whatever the location might be, given how everything that eventually transpires as part of the ongoing narrative is informed by it. In other words, try relocating the stories elsewhere, and what's the effect? They almost immediately cease to exist.
Nothing is more fatiguing than winter, the extreme and unrelenting snow and below zero temperatures, and the seemingly unbearable sameness of the days without sunshine, and the measures one takes - if they're locals, permanent residents - against an environment such as this. And most vulnerable/susceptible are the kids, who have no options other than to scheme and dream themselves into all kinds of trouble.
First of all, I don't think of myself as a northern Michigan writer. I think of myself as an American writer who happens - and yes, by choice, and for a long time now - to live in this particular place, and where, as the joke goes, there are only three seasons: July, August, and winter.
I was once referred to in a Kirkus review as a "northern Michigan version of Andre Dubus." My editor called me after the review came out and asked if I was okay with that. What part? I wondered. Finding myself in the same sentence with Andre Dubus? What could be better than that? Or perhaps - and more likely, my editor meant being pigeonholed as a writer of this remote region "mostly ignored by the rest of the world," as Jim Harrison says.
When Kevin Brockmeier says, "Everything, given the possibility, would choose to be a song," I recognize the implicit truth of such a miracle. What can I say, I'm Irish, and we take naturally to that sort of thing.
When Robert Bly visited Interlochen Center for the Arts so many years ago, he spoke to the creative writing majors and said, "The eye reports to the brain, but the ear reports to the heart." Perhaps this is the thing that musicians can do that writers can't ever, quite, but it is what I aspire to, that sense/power of the auditory, and the belief that to hear more clearly is to see more clearly, and that to see more clearly is to feel more deeply.
I'm always looking for poetry's place in the prose. For that moment, let's say, that arrests time, or that sentence in which the musical matrix or trope, the sounds of the words arranged in a way that heightens perception, a tunefulness that more clearly defines and transfers the feeling I'm after to the reader.
As David Roderick says about writing, "It's not the tale that pleases, it's the telling," and I could not agree more.
I began as a poet, moved to short fiction, then to novel writing, and, for the past twelve years, back to stories. I sometimes wonder if the pendulum will swing all the way back to where I began. As T.S. Eliot says, "In my end is my beginning," but for now I'm staying put, sitting tight, and loving the short story form way too much to leave it quite yet.
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