Author Interview: Edward Porter
For the record, Bull City Press is on Team Edward! Er… at least when it comes to this next installment of our interview series. Jordan Wingate, Bull City Citizen and fiction reader for Inch, gives Edward Porter a chance to flex his literary muscles for the viewers (er… readers) at home.
Since his debut in Inch (“Phil and Emily,” Inch #6), Edward Porter has been published in Colorado Review, Booth, and the anthology Best New American Voices 2010. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, was a fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007-2008, and is currently working on a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, as well as a collection of short stories.
Jordan Wingate: First of all, I have to ask if you are actually related to Philip Sheridan – a Union general during the Civil War – or is American History only a subject of interest?
Edward Porter: My grandmother’s maiden name was Sheridan, and the family lore is that we’re related to General Phil. I have no idea if it’s true or not, and I prefer it that way. He’s a fascinating case, a real Shiva figure, a kind of fire-hose of violence that got unleashed in both of America’s great tragedies. He was one of the officers who finally got the Union’s act together in the Civil War, so arguably he was instrumental in ending slavery. His next gig was fighting the Great Plains Indians: he couldn’t defeat them in battle, but he made them surrender by hunting down their women and children and killing off the buffalo. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” is usually attributed to him. The nation saw him as a major hero in both wars, but of course today he comes off like a big-budget Charles Manson. When I was a kid, it was like being related to James Bond – now it’s like being related to Goldfinger. He was a little guy with a remarkable talent for killing people and burning their homes. Maybe he was just trying to work out his karma as best he could. Naturally, I jumped on all this as an opportunity for comedy. I chalk that up to my total inability to wrap my head around what may or may not be the family legacy. His other great quote, by the way, was, “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.” Halfway through my second summer in Houston, I see his point. But his widow had the best line. She never remarried, saying, “I’d rather be the widow of Phil Sheridan than the wife of any man living.” There’s no question the guy inspired love, and I think Emily would have found him exciting. Did I mention that he had an Indian girlfriend and founded Yellowstone Park? It just goes on and on. But what he really wanted out of life was to get published, so he’s got that soul-connection with most Inch readers.
JW: Presumably, the “one poem” Dickinson gets from her fling with Sheridan is Poem 1129? “Tell all the Truth but Tell It Slant.” You end “Phil and Emily” with the words “True Story.” Would you say you are taking Dickinson’s advice, or poking fun at it?
EP: “Phil and Emily” started as an epigraph to another, longer story. In that story, I wanted to use events from my life in a literal way, but I also needed to hide my tracks: partly to make the story readable, and partly to keep my humiliation to an endurable level. I hit on a fiendish device, and walked around for a couple of days giggling to myself, “Yeah, tell the truth but tell it slant.” I take Ms. Dickinson’s advice as gospel: it’s her legend I’m poking fun at. I’ve always wanted to see her portrayed as a sex-fiend. Maybe I don’t trust anyone who isn’t manifestly a sex-fiend, and I’m trying to bring her down to my level.
JW: Where do you believe short fiction – and poetry – obtains its power? Is it a form you find easy to work with or is it, as author Reynolds Price said, “as tough as mining coal?”
EP: I’ll go Reynolds Price one better and say that writing fiction is like a fish trying to mine coal with a bicycle, alone in the forest with no one to hear. But then there’s that one day every year or two when all you have to do is open your mouth and sing. That’s a good day, when you get it.
JW: Given your background as an actor, do you ever feel compelled to write screenplays instead of fiction? Or do you incorporate something from the dramatic stage in to your writing?
EP: One of the things that drove me to fiction was how dependent you are in the theater on other people – you can’t practice your art until sixteen other grandiose narcissists from the East Village are on board. Film is worse: you’ve got to get a major corporation and some banks on board as well. Fiction only requires the one grandiose narcissist. In theory, I’d love to write for the theater or film, but I’ve seen a lot of agony and wasted years as people struggled to get their dreams made flesh.
Actually, the main fall-out from my being an actor for so long is that I tend to be impatient with fiction that doesn’t undertake drama, or undertakes it only as a pretense on which to mount essentially lyrical or intellectual concerns. Of course, that’s a description of “Phil and Emily.”
JW: Authors have claimed both to have begun writing a story blindly as well as to have known the very last words of their story before they began. Do you have a certain process in producing your stories? In the context of your experience as a carpenter, do you begin with raw planks of wood, or do you already have the finished table in mind?
EP: Sometimes I start with the finished table in mind and end up with raw planks of wood. Woodworking and fiction are both deeply involved with structure, but text on a laptop is a more reversible proposition than mahogany on a router table. There’s an element of improvisation in woodworking, but it usually involves making mistakes look intentional. Most stories have givens in their conception – you might know that at the end the triceratops is going to tell the waitress he’s always been in love with her – but you have to write it to find out how he gets there and what it means. All the writers I know fight a daily battle of trying to listen to their own work. The subconscious is probably going to throw something worthwhile out there, but you’ve got to be open to it when it happens – you can’t be hell-bent on your plan. That goes double for acting, by the way.
Author Interview: Cynthia Reeves
Here at Bull City Press we mostly stand around chewing cud, but every now and then we like to shake things up and chew the fat.
For our first installment in this series, Jordan Wingate, UNC-CH student and Bull City assistant extraordinaire, gave Cynthia Reeves (photo) as many words as she wanted to expound on tiny fiction. Cynthia Reeves earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Ontario Review, Colorado Review, and most recently, Wreckage of Reason. Badlands, her first book, won Miami University Press’s 2006 Novella Contest and was published in December 2007. Among other awards and recognitions, her flash fiction “The Wedding Dress” won New Millennium’s 2006 Short-Short Fiction Prize. Cynthia is currently at work on a series of linked stories set in post-World War I Italy, and a contemporary novel set in mid-coast Maine.
Jordan: Before receiving your MFA in creative writing, you largely studied economics as an undergraduate. At 300 words, “Flight” itself is written very economically, and there also exist small economies of give-and-take within the story: the exchange between pain and religion; between belief and security; between appearance and love. Do you feel that your previous interest in economics is pushing through into your writing?
Cyndi: I’d say the holdover from my econ days is more my tendency to be analytical, and perhaps that trait finds its way into my writing. After I finish writing a draft of a story, I try to discover its underlying “system,” the way its subconscious idea(s), symbols, actions, and so forth work together to tell more than just the surface story. In this case, I was fascinated by the correspondence between Callie’s attempt to hold on to the things of the earth (and especially her son), even as those things drifted away, and her attempt to embrace the spiritual as solace in the midst of her dying. I trimmed away anything in the early drafts that didn’t serve these enmeshed purposes. The story thus became this miniature sort of almost prose poem honoring the push-pull of death and the promise of an afterlife.
Jordan: In your story “Flight,” the mother, Callie, believes she is floating on a cloud and sees her son Danny floating away with white angel wings. Though these are only hallucinations from the painkillers she receives in her hospital bed, you make a point of saying that the relief of morphine almost made her believe in God. Could you talk a little more about why you fused drugs, heaven, and disease your story?
Cyndi: A friend of mine died of cancer. A fallen-away Catholic, she struggled at the end of her life to find some way back to faith, or at least back to a belief in God. Her biggest fear was that God would know she was only trying to get back in His good graces because she was dying. We laughed over that, but the undercurrent of fear created sadness and psychic pain. She also struggled with leaving her eight-year-old son behind when she died. In the last two months of her life, she was on a morphine pump to relieve pain, and the increasing doses of morphine caused her to hallucinate. One night near the end, I was alone with her in her family room when she started talking to her son as if he were floating past us. Then she turned to me, lucid again, and asked if she just told me her son had wings. I said yes, and we laughed at that too and then went on with our conversation. I wondered later how much of that hallucination was informed by her fears – of leaving and being left, of being abandoned by God, and so forth. And so I merged all of these things in the story.
Jordan: It has been said that any good character should be like an iceberg, meaning that the author must know the 90 percent of the character’s background that the reader never sees in order to create the believable 10 percent that the reader does see. Your recent novel Badlands exemplifies this statement, insofar as it began with what you called a “failed” six-page short story you wrote ten years ago and later expanded in to a 200+ page book. With shorter fiction and micro-fiction especially, do you think it is important for the writer to have a profound understanding of the world their story creates, in spite of the brevity of the form?
Cyndi: The danger in creating both the novella Badlands and the series of micro-fictions that includes “Flight” was that I understood that world too well – the world of cancer and its treatment and dying and death – having experienced both my friend’s death from cancer as well as my husband’s struggle with Hodgkin’s disease. It’s a common problem that all writers face in any form, but especially in the short forms – thinking things are on the page that really exist only in the writer’s mind. In Badlands, I created the bones of the story, and then kept inserting more and more flesh in the spaces until I arrived at some balance between allowing the white space its power while still giving the reader a sense that the world I created was complete. As short as they are, the micro-fictions were arrived at in exactly the opposite way, by putting everything in at first and then paring away the unnecessary.
Jordan: Given that you are a novelist who has also been published in Inch, how do you believe a work of micro-fiction operates on readers in ways as powerful as novels?
Cyndi: Technically, Badlands is a novella – a short novel. I’m hoping to “graduate” to the novel with my next book. In any case, I’m drawn to forms that use poetic compression to create their worlds. I don’t spend a lot of time leading readers by the hand, for example, by describing settings or characters if those descriptions don’t serve the larger intentions of the story, or by moving characters around the room, so to speak. That drives some readers crazy. Yet people who have read my work tell me its strength is in the images. I think what they’re responding to is that I rely on a series of images – visual, emotional – to convey story. I think writers who work this way can create worlds as powerful as those of longer-winded short story writers and novelists in much less space. The images are like a short hand for a larger world.
Jordan: On writing short stories, Chekhov claimed that the writing should sigh when the reader sobs, meaning that the narrative voice should remain somewhat emotionally distant in order to have an impact on the reader. Though “Flight” resists what could easily be melodrama, do you ever find yourself getting too emotionally involved in your characters while writing? If so, how do you combat this, and back away from these emotions?
Cyndi: I love Richard Hugo’s assertion in The Triggering Town that he’s not much interested in writing that doesn’t risk sentimentality. But I do think it’s important to control writing with strong emotional content so that the writer is not simply manipulating the reader’s emotional response. I can give you an example. There’s a scene in Badlands in which the husband and kids are forced to give the dying wife/mother a morphine injection that she’s resisting. The scene could have easily fallen into melodrama, especially if I had followed my tendency to portray the drama lyrically. Instead, I stripped every word that had any emotional content – it’s pretty much a he-did-this and she-did-that kind of scene. I think the scene serves as a tonal counterpoint to some of the less emotional scenes that are more lyrically written. Nevertheless, the injection scene provokes the strongest emotional reaction of the novella, not only in my readers, but also in me. It was a lesson for me to finally accomplish that.
Cynthia’s story “Flight” appears in Inch #4. We’re almost sold out; get your copy before they’re gone at http://inch.bullcitypress.com/.
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