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7/14/2008 [ interview ]
An Interview with John Dufresne
by Tom DeMarchi
This month, W.W. Norton, John Dufresne’s longtime publisher, released his most recent novel, Requiem, Mass. In addition to his works of fiction, he has a book on fiction writing titled The Lie That Tells a Truth. Carl Hiassen chose Dufresne’s story "The Timing of Unfelt Smiles" for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2007. In April 2008, Grand Valley Productions filmed To Live and Die in Dixie, based on a screenplay Dufresne co-wrote with Donald Papy. Since 1989 he has been teaching in the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University. He lives in Dania Beach, Florida, with his wife and son. For more information on John Dufresne, visit http://johndufresne.wordpress.com.
The following is an excerpt from our full interview with John Dufresne, appearing in issue 27.1. Sign up for a one-year subscription to read more John Dufresne—we'll send you Vol. 27.1 in January 2009!
Q: Why did you decide to use Johnny as the narrator for Requiem, Mass.?
A: He had a story to tell. And I like Spot and Annick and Johnny. I wanted to see what they were up to. I wanted to write a story about two children trying to survive a difficult childhood, and I wanted to play with the forms of fiction and memoir. Fiction is telling the truth; memoir is telling the facts, and facts are subject to interpretation, or we wouldn’t have a term like "true facts," and we wouldn’t have different recollections of the same event. A fiction writer has no reason to lie. A memoirist has an illusion to protect. It seems to me that imagination and memory are essentially the same creative process. Both are ways of telling stories, of making meaning. But here’s a difference. We can know about, but can never really know in depth, anyone else in our lives. We’re a puzzle to ourselves half the time. But we can know fictional characters in full, and the fact that we can know everything about them suggests a more comprehensible, and a more manageable world. And that’s why we read fiction and why we write it.
When I write stories, I know that I know nothing. When I write about my life, I think I know what I’m talking about, and that’s dangerous and inherently dishonest. Who has time for dishonesty? So I hit on the notion of letting Johnny, the eponymous narrator of my last story collection [Johnny Too Bad], a fiction writer himself, and my alter-ego, I suppose (not me, but the me I might wish to be, the better me, the sweeter me, the smarter me, the me with the heartbreaking past and the resplendent future), write a memoir, and I let him know that he could appropriate any of my memories as his own, and no one would be any the wiser. So Johnny writes about how he came to save his family, only to lose them again, and I write about Johnny coming to understand his past and in so doing come to understand my own. At least a little bit. Two birds, one stone.
Not all of Johnny’s memories were borrowed; some were invented, shaped, and polished so that as Johnny looked back at his life, I could use his gaze to see my own.
Q: I know that you use photographs in class as writing prompts. How do the visual arts inform writing?
A: Diane Arbus said, "I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them." Photographs and paintings teach you to see, to gaze, to look at all of what’s there. I do what I always tend to do when I look at anything. Imagine the interior lives of the people in the photo or painting, or the people who inhabit the place in the picture. I recently came across this entry in Flaubert’s Egyptian Travel Journal in Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel: "I’m obsessed with inventing stories for people I come across. An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like. I want to know what they do, where they’re from, their names, what they’re thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, whom they’ve loved, what they dream of . . . and if they happen to be women (especially youngish ones), then the urge becomes intense. How quickly you would want to see that one naked, admit it, and naked through to her heart. How you try to learn where she’s coming from, where she’s going, why she’s here and not elsewhere! While letting your eyes wander all over her, you imagine love affairs for her, you ascribe deep feelings to her. You think of what her bedroom looks like, and a thousand things besides . . . right down to the battered slippers into which she must slip her feet when she gets out of bed." I’m obsessed with making up stories of people I see in photos and paintings. Students seem to respond well to the exercises—they have a character in front of them and a setting and so they feel that they have a head start on the narrative, and they do.
Q: In addition to being a big fan of the visual arts, you’re a big music fan. What’s in your iPod?
A: About six thousand songs. I’ve got opera, Bluegrass, Gregorian chants, rock and roll, hip hop, reggae, jazz, doo-wop, classical. Let’s see, Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys; Steeleye Span and Steely Dan; Moxy Fruvous and Roxy Music; Little Feat and Little Milton; Charles Trenet and Gnarls Barkley; I have more Van Morrison and Richard Thompson than anyone else. Willie Nelson, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, Lyle Lovett, Joni Mitchell, Joe Strummer, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Wylie and the Wild West, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Louis Prima, the Texas Tornados, Fountains of Wayne, the Weakerthans, Rancid. Spike Jones and Pavarotti.
Q: John K. Samson from The Weakerthans wrote at least two songs ("Sun in an Empty Room" and "Night Windows") based on Hopper paintings. Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring is told from the point of view of Vermeer’s famous subject. Can you point to any of your stories that are inspired by a painting or photograph or song? And if it’s not too demystifying, can you describe how the story evolved from the image/sound to the page?
A: I’ve got a long section in Requiem, Mass. inspired by Hopper’s Gas. Imagining the life of the guy who’s alone at night, closing up the Mobil station. What he does when he goes home. And a prose poem written on a Hopper painting published in an anthology called French Connections. The poem and the painting are both called "Cape Cod Afternoon." In fact here’s the poem:
I’m in a house in a Hopper painting, a house in Truro, a half mile through the moors to
the beach. The windows are shuttered and blank. The house is silent. Those who live here
are outside standing in the sun, their lengthening shadows still. No clutter in the closets,
no pictures framed on walls. No cellar, no attic, no memories, no dreams. No dust in
corners, just this studied violence of furniture arranged. Drawers, chests, cabinets, and
wardrobes—some need for secrecy. The oak floorboards creak as I walk to the door and
throw it open, letting the universe in.
I use songs a lot; like me my characters enjoy music. But I’m not sure I’ve ever written an entire story based on a song. I did base a story in my first book on a WPA photograph I saw. The photo was of a migrant laborer and his boy in a Florida work camp. The story is "What Follows in the Wake of Love?"
Q: What would you never want to do for a living?
A: Punch in at 9:00 and punch out at 5:00. I suppose the worst job for me would have something to do with calculations. Like being an accountant.
Q: What’s your favorite word?
A: Today my favorite word is ficelle—a trick, artifice, stage device—because it’s new to me. I learned it while reading about Shakespeare. That and skeevy, as in he’s a skeevy maggot, meaning disgusting or distasteful, nasty. I discovered the word not too long ago and used it in something I wrote, and then suddenly I heard everyone using it. I figure they must have been using it all along and I was deaf to it.
Q: What’s your least favorite word?
A: I kind of like them all. But some get overused and stale. Like incredible. Mostly words get abused in phrases and become distasteful in that way. Phrases like "it is what it is" or "back in the day" or "it’s all good" or "don’t go there" or "too much information."
Q: The last time we spoke, you were working on a new fiction writing guide that focuses on the novel. Are you still working on it? And how does it differ from The Lie That Tells a Truth?
A: I’ve finished for now and sent it off to Norton, which means I’ll get notes back from my editor and will be back at it again. It’s called Is Life Like This? and it focuses on writing the novel and not the story—so it has a lot more to say about structure and texture and trajectory and stamina. And there’s a plan in there to complete a draft of your novel in six months. Something I have never done, by the way. Maybe I should read the book.
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Copyright © 2009 The Southeast Review
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