Kirk Nesset
is the author
of two books of short stories, Paradise Road and
Mr. Agreeable, as well as a book of translations, Alphabet of the World, a nonfiction study, The Stories of Raymond Carver, and, his latest, a book of poems,
Saint X. His stories, poems, translations, and essays have appeared in
such journals as The
Paris Review,
The
Kenyon Review,
The
Southern Review,
American
Poetry Review,
Gettysburg
Review,
Iowa
Review,
New
England Review,
Ploughshares,
Witness,
and Prairie
Schooner.
His flash fiction has been widely anthologized: most recently in Flash Fiction Funny, but also The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXIII, Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories, Sudden Stories, and New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond,
among others. Nesset teaches at Allegheny College and is writer in
residence at Black Forest Writing Seminars in Freiburg, Germany.
On
November 21, 2013, I had the opportunity to sit down with Kirk Nesset
and his well-behaved Pomeranian at Oak Street Drafthouse in Denton,
Texas. My interest in meeting him stemmed primarily from my interest
in his flash fiction. I frankly declare that “I Want You to Kill
Me,” from Mr. Agreeable, is one of the best short stories ever
written, short-short or not. Like many of the other stories in the
collection, it’s as provocative and visceral in its abstract
expressionism as any painting by Chaïm Soutine, with unsettling
intimacy, absurd joy and heartbreak. After a couple of IPAs, we
proceeded around the corner to Andaman Thai Restaurant, with Ryan the
Pomeranian quiet as a mouse at Kirk’s feet in his portable carrier
(with the exception of one brief escape).
The
first thing about Kirk that struck me was his precision. With great
deliberation, he minces his words, and I don’t mean he “weakens”
or “softens” them, and neither is there an over-wrought pause
between. There’s a vigorous delicacy to his manner and an
exactness, a cleaving, to his word choice—a sheerness. A
navigation. He’s one who will tell on himself wryly but not for the
cheapness of a laugh, though I laughed plenty. He’s simply an
honest poet. I found the jazz of him somewhat reminiscent of Barry
Hannah, my mentor and friend, so it came as little surprise to learn
that Barry was his friend, his hero, for many years, too. We
discussed, among other things, Barry’s “Even Greenland,” one of
the classics in the genre of sudden fiction. Here is my account,
albeit polished, of those other things.
Sidney
Thompson (ST): What were your sources of inspiration as an aspiring
fiction writer, and what are they now?
Kirk
Nesset (KN): I read a great deal as a child, so I was inspired early.
Aesop and Grimm and the Nancy Drew books had the most impact, I
think, early on. Then Louis Carroll and Poe, Zane Grey and Jack
London. London’s autobiographical portrait of an artist, Martin
Eden, pretty much knocked me to pieces. By
the time I hit high school I’d read all of Hemingway, Fitzgerald,
Mansfield, O’Connor, Thomas Wolf, Lawrence Durrell and Hesse, and
had dipped into many others. Mainly this was because of a wonderful
thing my parents had done. In 1969, relocating to California from
Seattle, they “killed the television,” as the phrase went then.
After that all I did at home was read and sing and play guitar, stack
wood and play board games. As an English major later at college and
grad school, I was still a voracious reader, most voracious during
the summer. The books I loved then made me the writer I am, I
believe. They not only taught me craft but taught me how to perceive.
Don Quixote. Tom
Jones. Middlemarch. The Brothers Karamazov. Lolita.
Beckett’s Malone Dies.
Atwood’s Surfacing.
DeLillo’s White Noise.
I’m still completely TV-illiterate, and not nearly as
informed as some about film. I’m not embarrassed to admit it.
Bookish is good.
(ST):
Are there more recent writers?
(KN):
Most inspiring to me have been Barry Hannah, Jeanette Winterson,
Alice Munro, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders and of course Carver,
along with DeLillo and Atwood. I used to read around a lot more.
These last years I’ve read less widely and comprehensively. I was
relieved years ago when Barry Hannah told me how he had been reading.
He was presenting that evening at Allegheny College and I’d gone to
the hotel to pick him up. He was sitting reading in the lobby and
tucked the book in his bag when he saw me. In the car I asked who he
favored these days, expecting to hear names and titles one heard on
the breeze then. I may have mentioned those titles and names. Barry
said he had heard of those authors but hadn’t read them. Rather
than reading around, he told me, he was rereading the books he loved.
Some of them he’d read, he said, twenty or twenty-five times. The
book he’d slid in his bag, by the way, was Beckett’s Molloy.
I
didn’t study writing in a writing program, I should say. I’m
truly “old school.” I studied literature. I didn’t know I was
aspiring to write until I was well into grad school. I’d never
presumed to think that writing was a thing people did. I began at
UCSB as a Renaissance scholar and wound up writing on Carver. Lit
crit and theory drove me to creative writing, it seems. But the books
I had read and was reading were key. Aside from a pair of writer’s
conferences, and aside from the help of some generous mentors—Barry
Spacks, Steven Allaback, Christopher Buckley—the literary models
were crucial. The books I had read were my teachers.
(ST):
In hindsight, as author of The Stories of
Raymond Carver: A Critical Study, what about
Carver’s writing (or Gordon Lish’s editing) do you believe is
possibly the least understood or appreciated?
(KN):
The inexplicable thing about Ray, what we don’t talk about when we
talk about Carver, is atmosphere and tone. The eerie moods he
creates. For sure, Gordon Lish helped to cultivate this. Mainly it
comes from compression, constriction, verbal omission, a ruthless
bareness, not to mention the awkward, almost extraterrestrial voices
Carver finds. It’s a poetics of silence in prose, you could say.
Everywhere in Carver are hints about what can’t be represented, or
written, or said. People tend to see social drama—the catastrophe
of the plight of the lower middle class, poor prospects, alcoholism,
et cetera—and don’t notice the nuances. Carver’s work is richer
and stranger than that. The prose is sometimes so blank, so terribly
“real,” it borders on expressionism. He hyperextends realism,
such that an oppressive, inhospitable world seems that much less
full, less hospitable. The stories make you “feel the force of the
paradox,” as Claude Richard writes, “that ensures that the
deepest anxiety is, precisely, that which does not let itself speak.”
(ST):
While primarily a fiction writer, you also publish poetry and
translation. Are there discernible differences in style, subject
matter, or mood when you approach one genre or another?
(KN):
Actually, when you weigh the numbers of pieces appearing over the
years, you’ll see I publish more poems and translations than
fictions. They’re shorter, easier to place and more manageable,
given space considerations. But you’re right, I do consider myself
a fiction writer first and foremost. Lately I have also been
publishing essays—on Carver, and on writing, fiction pedagogy
especially. Issues related to genre do arise, yes, each time I sit
down to write. Above all when I begin something new. “Approach”
is the key word here. When I’m working from a prompt, or a
solicitation from an editor, I tend to move fairly straightforwardly
into the genre in question. It’s always a challenge, of course,
starting a piece. With nonfiction I tend to outline and plan ahead,
even if I wind up discarding those plans. The writing is intuitive,
certainly, but it’s nice to line up your ducks, even if you don’t
shoot them all down. With fiction, I locate a character and setting
and try to discover what’s lurking. What’s intriguing,
disturbing. And then sniff out motivation, causality, tap into the
mystery, hoping the story will grow or unfold, revealing its secrets.
With poetry, typically, it’s the exhilaration of language itself
that draws me in, that incites the poem. Some of my verse is
narrative, and much of it makes sense. But it doesn’t have to—which
is incredibly freeing, since nonfiction and fiction only rarely allow
for such freedom. Margaret Atwood believes different parts of the
brain are at work in what she calls ambidextrous writers, depending
on genre. When you write fiction you’re methodical, organized. And
poetry is “a state of free float.”
What’s
complicated, though, I find, is that sometimes you write and look
what you have and don’t know what you’ve written. I’ll write
what I think is a poem, and take out the line breaks and see it’s a
story, a compact micro tale. Or vise versa. I have pieces in the mail
now, I hesitate to admit, that are submitted in both genres. As
stories and poems.
Which genre will win?
Translation
on the other hand is something else altogether. I like it and do it a
lot, maybe because as a way of writing it feels less intimidating.
It’s like sitting down to work out a puzzle. It’s not my soul or
vertiginous inner abyss on the line, seemingly, but somebody else’s.
The matter is already there on the page. There’s more to it,
though, as we know. A translation isn’t a puzzle, finally. It isn’t
just transposition, substitution, clever maneuvers with dactyls and
dictionaries. It’s its own creature. It’s an enacted, unfolding
thing, an experience in a new tongue that approximates the original.
It may be easy to start, but the piece in English must live and
breathe as a poem or story. It needs a beating heart. It needs
musical and emotional coherence, as well as semantic finesse.
(ST):
Of your short-short story collection Mr.
Agreeable, Barry Hannah declared, “Nesset is
attuned to the fine-edged songs of the mundane,” while Bret Lott
said that you have “given us a beautiful bouquet of crystal shards,
each one of which, when held to the light, refracts and amplifies and
makes new the entire notion of light.” How conscious are you of
technique—of discovering and refining that fine edge, that crystal
shard—when inside the writing process of your first draft?
(KN):
I’d like to say that I just draft when I draft—write like an ape,
go to town, let the gate down. But that’s very rarely the case.
Which is why the process of drafting is often so awful to me. I write
slowly. Excruciatingly. I’m lucky to get a page a day, if that. And
while I’m aware of the fact that polish comes later—attention to
the fine edges and shards—I can’t just madly excrete, idiot
savant that I am, that we all are, or should be, initially. For me,
voice must click from the very first sentence and keep clicking from
there, or come close to clicking. Otherwise, I won’t believe the
voice, or the piece, enough to go on. So yes, there is attention to
technique from the start, but not the intense attention that comes
later. The early sensitivity is about getting voice right. Which
necessarily includes sentence rhythm, diction, cadence and sound.
Other
writers work or worked this way, too, obviously. Flannery O’Connor,
Richard Ford, DeLillo and Hannah, among others. I worked with Ford,
in fact, late in the 80s, at the Squaw Valley Writers Center in
California. I remember asking him what he did in a draft when he got
stuck. He backtracked, he told me. He returned to where the voice of
the prose sounded true, and looked to see where it diverged, or
derailed. He’d work to fix that, he said, and proceed from there.
I
love revision, as a lot of us do. There’s very little suffering
there, unlike with drafting. And I’m a ruthless reviser. If I’m
lucky I’m done after sixty or seventy drafts. Usually it’s more
like a hundred, one hundred fifty. Two hundred drafts isn’t
unusual, depending.
(ST):
Depending on what?
(KN):
Depending on how the story complies, unfolds, aligns energetically.
On the way voice, rhythm, urgency, tension and pace comply or fail to
comply. Fail to arrive. Or arrive. Become manifest on the page.
(ST):
About your collection Paradise Road,
winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Ann
Beattie said, “These
stories are melodious when they need to be, jangle when we need to
hear what's discordant.” I
understand that you have a background in music. How coincidental are
Beattie’s instincts?
(KN):
I’m less conscious than some, I think, about what sings or clacks
in my work. Crafting sound is an intuitive process, at least for me.
Even a sharp listener, a musically-illiterate writer at some point
senses the orchestral nature of narrative, the melody and harmony and
rests and refrains in every story or poem, the rise to crescendo.
Still, my writing wouldn’t sound the way it does, I suppose, if
music hadn’t preceded. I was a musician long before I was a writer.
Musicians think in sounds, express and emote in nonverbal ways.
Language is rhythmic and sonic, obviously. And if your ear is
trained, writing is music as well. I’m as interested in the way
something sounds on the page when I write, or revise, as I am in what
the thing says, or conveys. It’s hard to say, though, how exactly I
know what I know, or how influence works. I’d like to say that the
way I manage and measure my stories or poems arises from song. That
my modulations in voice, rhythm, or awareness of such, arise
likewise. But no. It’s a thing you can’t nail down, since what we
absorb is internal. Is internalized. And what’s internal is
mysterious, finally.
What’s
not mysterious is the fact that music is fun. Much of it for me, all
of this singing and playing on stage, is about not writing. I’m in
two bands now, with three rehearsals a week, 5 or 6 shows per month
and daily music homework. That’s a lot of time away from writing,
or from preparing to write. Nabokov had his butterflies, so I can
have this, I guess. For me, we could say, music is creativity minus
the agony, unease and worry, the incinerating self-conscious flames.
It’s not lonely or solitary. And there’s free beer.
(ST):
What do you love or hate most about writing or publishing, and what
do you intend to do about it?
(KN):
I love hearing that something I wrote mattered to someone. Especially
when whatever it was mattered to someone for reasons I could never
have imagined beforehand, much less intended. I got a letter years
ago from a high school teacher saying he liked my book on Carver so
much he wanted to apply to grad school in English. And he did. And
got in. I still get fan mail for Mr. Agreeable
and Paradise Road,
some of it strange, some vaguely frightening, but most
of it very uplifting.
I
love, too, the rare affirmation that comes in the form of
acceptances. Stories, poems, essays, translations, pieces slated for
press. Book manuscripts, especially, which can be exhausting to the point of
nightmarish to peddle. There’s a glow, you know, that remains,
after the news comes, which can last days. Wow, look, you think, I’m
not only not getting kicked or beaten today, but somebody likes what
I wrote. And wants to promote it.
Best
of all I love the feeling of completing a draft. The glow of that
lasts quite a bit longer.
(ST):
What do you hate?
(KN): That
nothing’s consistent. The process and progress of writing, I mean.
I thought early on that there were lessons you learned that
eventually made it all easier. On one level that’s true, maybe.
Mostly it’s not the case. Each project is like building Rome again
from the ground up. The process is laborious, tedious, fraught with
doubt and misgiving.
I
also don’t like the fact, speaking of which, that writing turns you
so inward at times you think you’re moving completely over the
edge, which isn’t pleasant. But even more I despise the
alternative—not writing. Sometimes you need to lay off awhile to
refill. A day or two is okay, but after that things get tricky. How
did Kafka put it? “A non-writing writer is a monster courting
insanity.”
More
and more these days, though, I don’t hate much. I try to be
grateful for what I’ve accomplished or earned and resent less and
less. Because if you’re in this for good you can’t expect much.
You write and write and take what you get and feel thankful. The
rewards usually aren’t very visible. When I was fresh out of grad
school, rejection was a palpable, personal thing. An agent would
respond with cutting remarks—less than charitable, cruel, but also
helpful and true—and I’d feel disemboweled for weeks. Which doesn’t help. You eventually stop taking things
personally. Your skin thickens. It has to, or you won’t last in
this business. I read a review weeks ago of Saint
X, for example, my new book of poems. The
reviewer destroyed it. Did I hate her? Yes, momentarily. Then I
reread the review and thought, how sad. Here is a woman who seems to
take the craft seriously and has a degree but hasn’t yet learned
to read, can’t tune in to the way poetic language evokes. How sad,
when journals give reviews to reviewers unprepared to review.
What
to do, you ask, about the diminishing hating, and loving? Keep
writing. If we’re here for the long haul there’s not much else to
do. The best meditation practice, we know, comes in part from not
attaching to notions of outcome. The same goes for writing. “The
point of sitting is to sit,” my teacher Sasaki Roshi told me, once
upon a time at the L.A. Zen Center. The point of writing,
likewise, I think, is to write.
(ST):
What can we expect to see from you in the near future?
(KN):
My sixth book, a book of translations, is due out this summer at
Calypso Editions, a fine arts press in New York. Disappearances,
the new book will be called. A selected
anthology of micro fictions by a wonderful, highly visible Bolivian
writer, Edmundo Paz Soldán. His enigmatic, mellifluous fictions,
translated pour moi, have
gotten some attention in this country already. They’ve appeared in
the Boston Review, Chicago Review, Literary
Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, PANK and
Arroyo, among others,
including two of Norton’s anthologies—Flash
Fiction International and Sudden
Fiction Latino.
At
the moment I am finishing a manuscript of flash fiction, a bizarre,
inspired book-to-be I’m calling Burn. I
am also at work on a historical novel, set in northern California in
the 1880s. And a travel book involving the Philippines and Filipino
cuisine. And I am banging together what seems to be a novella, an
eighty or ninety page something-or-other that may join a small
constellation of old and new stories, all of which I hope to call the
next book-to-be.
