Interviewed by Katherine Burgess
Ryan Boudinot is the author of the short story collection The Littlest Hitler. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Nerve, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. Misconception is his latest book.
Q: Tell us a little bit about your new book, Misconception.
It's a novel about a man named Cedar and a woman named Kat. Most of it takes place in the '80s, when they were adolescents, but the novel is framed by more contemporary sections in which Kat, now a fiction writer, is running her memoir of those early years past Cedar. Bleh. I can never seem to describe it in a nutshell.
Q: Was your writing process at all different, going from short stories to a novel?
A: I used to think that there was more room for mistakes in a novel, that a short story has to be as close to perfect as possible, but after revising Misconception I'm not sure I believe that anymore. The central metaphor I had in mind when writing this novel was that of sharpening a stick. I remember sharpening sticks with pocket knives when I was a kid, and there was always this yearning for maximum sharpness. Like, how sharp can I possibly make it? But if you sharpen a stick too much, you end up with no stick. I cut out a lot from this novel. I'm happy with what's left. And I played it relatively straight this time. I wanted the language to be as unadorned as possible, stripped down and direct. With stories, I feel a bit more free to let the language itself freak out.
Q: We're always hearing that the short story is dying, that novels are the only fiction books that sell. Why do you think that is? Do you prefer one form to the other? How hard was it to get The Littlest Hitler published?
A: I really don't care about these dire predictions. And besides, I think they're untrue. So many people still care about short stories and novels and the writers who write them. Let me tell you who some of them are: Maud Newton, Steven Seighman, Aaron Burch, Stephen Elliott, Dave Eggers, Grove Atlantic, Tom Nissley, Richard Nash, Kevin Sampsell. And you, for that matter. Google any of them and you'll discover journals, blogs, sites devoted to obsessing over literary matters great and small. I think this is an absolutely amazing time to write fiction. And as a reader, Jesus. My brother, who is a librarian, has this great project in which he's setting out to read a work of fiction by an author from every country in the world. I think he's somewhere in the "B" countries. But just think about that. Could he have undertaken this project a hundred years ago?
As for preferring one form to another, I may have a slight bias toward the novel, in that I enjoy the long commitment of it, but I really feel that when writers put their balls on the line it's with short stories. As to the last part of this question, on how hard it was to get The Littlest Hitler published, I'd be hard pressed to say. I have nothing to compare the experience to. I mostly thank my agent, PJ Mark, for the great work he did submitting it.
Q: In December 2007 you circulated a free story, "An Enemy Combatant of My Own," as sort of a holiday gift to your fans. What was the response like?
A: It didn't get much of a response, to be honest. Which is fine. I recognize that the story wasn't all that full of holiday cheer. Merry Christmas, everybody! We're torturing people!
Q: In "An Enemy Combatant of My Own," Homeland Security starts calling upon private citizens to help torture terror suspects. How does this story speak to the current debate over what to do with Guantanamo detainees? What are some of the pitfalls an author should avoid when writing political satire?
A: Let me see if I can answer this in a roundabout way. "An Enemy Combatant of My Own" is sort of the last hurrah of a kind of short story I wrote for a few years while in the pit of the Bush years. A number of stories from The Littlest Hitler fall into this vein. I was shocked by how the administration wasn't just defiling certain American values, but how they were doing it with such impunity. So a lot of those stories are about violence without consequences, like "The Sales Team" and "Blood Relatives." "Enemy Combatant" was a kind of thought experiment. If the American public was so complicit with the kinds of torture happening at Guantanamo, not to mention all those black sites we still don't know much about, how far would they go if these practices were taking place in their own homes? So I thought, instead of an American family going about its merry little business in suburbia while people are being tortured in their names far away, why not have them actually doing the torturing?
As for the pitfalls of doing satire, I can't really think of any besides maybe not getting invited to the White House Correspondents' Dinner. There are more pitfalls in not satirizing weak men making cowardly decisions.
Q: You recently became a writer-in-residence at the nonprofit Richard Hugo House. How has that been going? How does teaching affect the way you think about your own work?
A: I haven't really formally started that gig yet, but I'm excited about it. I just finished teaching a 4-day intensive workshop there about writing about characters' actions, dialogue, thoughts, and feelings, which was swell. And I have been teaching at Goddard College's MFA program in Port Townsend, Washington for two years, as well as Goddard's BFA writing program since last April. I can't overstate how much I love teaching. Maybe it's because I spent ten years working in various skyscrapers in Seattle for tech companies, but sometimes I feel so lucky to have landed these positions I almost cry. Lately I've been thinking that for years I was a Knowledge Worker, but now it feels like I'm becoming a Wisdom Worker. And it does affect the way I think about my own work in that I'm forced to articulate things I think about writing that previously I only knew intuitively. Critiquing student work has made me a better editor of my own work, for sure.
Q: How does pop culture inform your work?
A: I guess you'd have to define pop culture. I wonder if pop culture even exists anymore. My household still gets Us Weekly, and when I happen to look at it these days (who can't resist Fashion Police?) I find that I don't know who 90% of these people are. Which in itself is fascinating, like looking at the pop culture of another country where certain figures are a huge deal but remain entirely unknown to most of the world. And I had a brief glimpse of that culture a few years ago when I worked on the Movies team at Amazon. I'd fly down to Hollywood occasionally to interview celebrities on the red carpet. When you're a foot away from someone you see all the time on TV, you not only can see the chicken-like flesh of his hairless chest, and the sweat beading on his made-up upper lip, but you can sense a real human being in there bearing the burden of wanting to desperately impress the world. It was pretty fascinating and disgusting and poignant all at once. Parts of the novel I'm writing right now deal with these weird vibes of celebrity.
Q. Who are you reading right now? Are there any writers currently making you jealous?
A: I just finished Bolaño's 2666 and started in immediately with The Savage Detectives. It's impossible to be jealous of brilliant writing. Right now I'm reading Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester, and thinking about art that engages its audience at the level of the nervous system. I'm re-reading some poems from David Berman's Actual Air, particularly the Lincoln assassination poem, which is a favorite. What else? Well, I went over some stories in a recent workshop, walking students through close readings of William Trevor's "The Penthouse Apartment," Wells Tower's "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned," and David Foster Wallace's "The Soul is Not a Smithy." I take it back about jealousy. I was really jealous of the Wells Tower story, because years ago while on an Icelandic lit jag I tried to write a story about a Viking and it really fell flat on its ass. But Wells figured out a way to do it, and he did it so brilliantly. That story is up there with Saunders's "Sea Oak" for me. Just incredible.
Q. What is your relationship with rejection like?
A: I don't like it. But there are different kinds of rejection. I tell people who get discouraged about how many times they get rejected by literary journals to go out and start one of their own. Then they get to see the sheer volume of submissions they have to contend with, and once they've done slush pile duty, rejections of their own submissions sting a lot less. I also tell students to find the aspects of their work that are non-negotiable, that they are willing to defend even if it means their work will never get published. That's the deal I made with myself when I was 20, that I'd continue writing and pouring my love into it even if it meant no other human being would ever read it. Find the reward in the act of writing, not in seeing it published. Sure, I like getting published, but that satisfaction lasts for five minutes tops. The satisfaction of writing a perfect line can be revisited and enjoyed for years.
Q. What writerly habit would you most like to break?
A: I procrastinate a lot, and I'm always trying to figure out when this procrastination is justified. Sometimes you're really not supposed to be sitting in front of the Word doc waiting for the magic to happen. There are also certain words I can't seem to spell no matter how many times I write them. I'm trying to think of them ... Oh, like commitment, assiduously, anything that might look normal with either a double or single consonant.
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: I guess I'd say I was a really popular nerd. I learned early on that if I entertained my peers I'd be okay. I sucked really badly at sports, and can quantify this suckiness as follows. In my entire sports career, which went from say first grade to freshman year of high school, I made 1 basketball basket, won two wrestling matches, won 1 heat in backstroke at a swim meet, made 1 goal in soccer, and tackled 1 guy in football. I was into Dungeons and Dragons, science fiction, and spending lots of time outside in the woods. I mainlined Stephen King books from fifth to eighth grade. From age six I knew I was supposed to write books. When I got to high school I consciously modeled myself after Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future and Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I decided that my task was to become as broadly popular as possible by befriending as many different kinds of people as I could. So I hung out with the stoners and played in a proto-grunge band, interviewed athletes for my hometown weekly paper, was a member of the debate team, ran for student body president and won by stitching together a coalition of all the "unpopular" kids. I was an average student in terms of grades, but I'm kind of proud of how I made some of my homeliest peers feel cool. I stood up for a lot of freaks and nerds.
Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
A: Read as much as you can, and read whatever it is that you think is fun and cool, not what you feel like you're "supposed" to read. Carry a notebook with you. Find the pleasure on the page.
