{"id":12515,"date":"2015-12-04T11:53:09","date_gmt":"2015-12-04T17:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/?p=12515"},"modified":"2016-03-12T17:11:23","modified_gmt":"2016-03-12T23:11:23","slug":"an-interview-with-charles-baxter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/12515","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with Charles Baxter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles Baxter is the author of five novels, five collections of short stories, three collections of poems, and two collections of essays. He\u2019s the recipient of many awards and recognitions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His novel <\/em>Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award. He currently teaches at the University of Minnesota. <\/p>\n

Baxter is known for his humor and wit, for the empathy and generosity of spirit that permeates his writing, and for his sharply drawn characters and settings. I had the pleasure of interviewing him when he visited Vanderbilt University in September 2015, held an afternoon Q&A with students, and delivered a stunning reading that evening.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Interviewer: You just published a collection of linked short stories, There\u2019s Something I Want You to Do<\/em>. In collections where the stories aren\u2019t connected at all, I sometimes feel sad when I get to the end of a great story and realize I\u2019ll never see those characters again.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Charles Baxter: A friend of mine calls that the literary one-night stand problem: the feeling you have after reading a story and thinking, \u201cThis relationship is over. This is just like a one-night stand.\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s such a good feeling when a character from one story shows up in another story and you realize that whole collection is taking place in the same world. How did you come to conceive of There\u2019s Something I Want You to Do<\/em> as a collection of linked stories?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Partly it was the memory of my growing up. I had a very bossy mother, who, whenever I came home from school, would say, \u201cThere\u2019s something I want you to do.\u201d When this book came out, my brother, and a friend of mine from college who knew my mother, both said, \u201cAre you quoting your mother? Because it sounds just like your mother.\u201d <\/p>\n

Also, I had a couple of old pages lying around that I hadn\u2019t been able to use. One was the opening of \u201cLoyalty.\u201d I wrote that opening fifteen or twenty years ago, and I never knew what I should do with it. I don\u2019t even think it was called \u201cLoyalty\u201d in those days. I also had the opening of \u201cBravery.\u201d When I was thinking of titles for these stories, I thought, \u201cHmm. That\u2019s very interesting, that I\u2019m giving them the titles of virtues. Where\u2019s this<\/em> going to go?\u201d So I just started following my own nose. I had seen this series on public television by Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski called The Decalogue<\/em>, and I had this crazy idea, to write a Decalogue–American stories with virtues and vices. Sometimes when you think of an odd idea, you\u2019re really saying to yourself that you need to take a chance on it. To everybody else, such an attempt would seem stupid, unworkable. Or plain crazy. <\/p>\n

So I started in on it, and then, because I had moved to the north loop of Minneapolis near the Mississippi, that area kept getting into the stories, and I kept putting in \u201cthere\u2019s something I want you to do\u201d everywhere because it was going through my head. So all these things started to go into the book. These weren\u2019t exactly conscious decisions. They resembled the way a book announces itself to you, the way it wants to get itself written. Sounds like a really pretensioso<\/em> way of putting it, but that\u2019s how it came out.<\/p>\n

In a linked collection, how do you make sure that each story can stand alone but also add something new to the rest of the stories?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You just keep paying attention to the action. You keep going until you find a resting place. In that book, \u201cChastity\u201d was the story that was the hardest for me to find an ending for. I wrote and wrote and rewrote the ending for that story. The easiest one was \u201cForbearance,\u201d because it was based on an anecdote I once heard from Miller Williams, who was a translator and had been translating the work of Giuseppe Belli. You just keep reading through what you\u2019ve already put down, and if you come to the end of the story and if you think, that\u2019s not over<\/em>, if the voice in you says, \u201cIt\u2019s not finished,\u201d then you have to keep working at it. Or you just say, the truth of this story hasn\u2019t emerged yet. It just isn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n

Do you feel like a book of linked stories is somewhere between a collection of disparate short stories and a novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I do. I\u2019m interested in these sorts of books, the ones that reuse certain characters or that are located in a particular setting. We were just talking about Dubliners<\/em>. Another book like that is Stuart Dybek\u2019s The Coast of Chicago<\/em>, which is really located in Chicago with a particular cast of characters. They don\u2019t all come up repeatedly, but the narrator seems to be usually the same guy. I like these sorts of books, the combination of the continuity and the discontinuity. You know you\u2019re not completely out in the middle of nowhere with each new story. You\u2019re somewhere that the general territory has been mapped out.<\/p>\n

In There\u2019s Something I Want You to Do<\/em>, I felt so grounded in Minneapolis. What is your approach to capturing the feel of a place?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that many of us have a place that you would call \u201cthe imagination\u2019s home.\u201d William Maxwell always thought his was central Illinois, where he grew up. Let\u2019s say you close your eyes and see a neighborhood outside Boston. That could be where you\u2019ll put your characters, because you know the people there, and you know how they talk and act. You have that authority. Even if I lived in Nashville, I couldn\u2019t write about it. I wouldn\u2019t be able to be authoritative about the people who live here the way I could be about the people in Michigan or Minnesota. Something draws you to a place, and you think: I have an open field here that hasn\u2019t been filled in<\/em>. I could live in Brooklyn, but I don\u2019t want to because everybody, all the writers in the world, live in Brooklyn. So they\u2019re all writing about Brooklyn. It\u2019s not that way in Minnesota, along the Mississippi. So I have these characters I can write about who are like and sort of unlike people everywhere.<\/p>\n

The phrase, \u201cthere\u2019s something I want you to do,\u201d crops up throughout the collection and takes on new meaning with each instance. Sometimes it\u2019s a character asking for something for him or herself and other times it\u2019s supposedly on behalf of somebody else. It\u2019s great to learn that the origin of this phrase is with your mother. Anything else to say on the significance of this phrase for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I felt I was making a great dramatic discovery. That sounds grandiose. In fact, I wasn\u2019t<\/em> making a great dramatic discovery, but it felt like one, because I could see that if I had a story in which two people were meeting on a commuter train and they start talking and one of them says, \u201cThere\u2019s something I want you to do,\u201d that it\u2019s not especially interesting. They\u2019re strangers, and they\u2019ll never see each other again. The phrase matters only if there\u2019s also a kind of social obligation, i.e., \u201cIf you love me, you\u2019ll do this for me.\u201d In this country now, social obligations are serious business. People are coming to blows in our culture right now about what we owe, if we owe anything<\/em>, to those who are in need of help. One of the characters in my books says we have these spiritual obligations to the human ruins around us. That\u2019s not an entirely popular view. It makes me sound like a Communist, or maybe a Christian.<\/p>\n

Can you talk about the role of the dreams and visitations that crop up in an otherwise realist landscape?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s always been part of my thing. Kathryn Davis, and others, call places where you\u2019re very close to another world, the world of spirits or dreams, a \u201cthin place.\u201d Fiction can take many forms, including a disturbed form of realism, and one of the most disturbed forms it may take is the visualization of spirits. I don\u2019t think of spirits as being totally imaginary. After all, if you see them, they\u2019re real. My novel Saul and Patsy<\/em> has ghosts. The Feast of Love<\/em> has a fortuneteller who\u2019s accurate. My first novel, First Light<\/em>, has a brother and sister who have a kind of psychic connection going on between the two of them. Shadow Play<\/em> is terribly God-haunted. All my novels have thin places located within them.<\/p>\n

I was stunned to hear before that that translator anecdote was true, because it was such a scathing response from the eminent translator.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Miller Williams was translating poems of Giuseppe Belli. There was this particular poem he couldn\u2019t translate and he tried and tried and got nowhere. He went to bed and Giuseppe Belli appeared to him in a dream. Belli said, \u201cYou\u2019re never going to get that right. This<\/em> is the poem you should be translating.\u201d And Miller Williams woke up and went to the book, and immediately translated it, no trouble at all. Years passed and he met Robert Fitzgerald, who had translated the Iliad<\/em>, the Odyssey<\/em> and the Aeneid<\/em>, and he told the story to Robert Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald looked at him with amazement and then said, \u201cAre you seriously telling me that that\u2019s the first<\/em> time that ever happened to you?\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just stunning because you think that the look of amazement is because at first you think that Fitzgerald can\u2019t believe that Williams has been visited by the spirit of the poet, but it\u2019s just the opposite.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right, he\u2019s amazed by Miller Williams\u2019 virginity. These visitations happen all the time to veteran translators, apparently.<\/p>\n

Speaking of endings, I feel like the endings of your stories are satisfying, but not overly neat or determined. There\u2019s still something unsettling lingering in the air. <\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s good when there\u2019s a bit of the music still in the air, when there\u2019s still something reverberating, when the story doesn\u2019t shut like a box. I suppose \u201cAvarice\u201d closes like a box with that old woman arriving in heaven, but \u201cGluttony\u201d ends with the doctor waving for his life. \u201cVanity\u201d ends with the old man sending that guy a postcard saying, \u201cDon\u2019t kid yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s another cutting ending.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s always hard to find the right ending. Robert Bly used to say that it is a tendency of American puritanism to write past the ending and to editorialize, as if we were reading one of Aesop\u2019s Fables. We need to stop editorializing and end the poem, end the story where it needs to end. When you\u2019ve said exactly enough and you don\u2019t need to say anymore, you stop.<\/p>\n

Speaking of \u201cGluttony,\u201d I love when Eiljah starts to reimagine himself as Gerald and then feels free to say and do things he\u2019d never do. I wonder if you ever think of your characters that way, as alter egos.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You live imaginatively inside these hypothetical people. You don\u2019t become them, exactly, any more than an actor becomes the role that she or he is playing. But you momentarily take on their way of seeing the world, their way of speaking. It\u2019s more like a love affair. When these characters leave me, I\u2019m bereft. I miss them. Even the bad ones are lovable. The openings of novels and stories are hard to find because I have to fall in love with the character. I have to be excited by the story I\u2019m about to tell. Writer\u2019s block is just a refusal to fall in love. <\/p>\n

I love that line. That\u2019s such a good way of thinking about it. <\/strong><\/p>\n

In A Feast of Love<\/em>, I just loved Chloe. I liked Bradley fine. Diana was exciting to be around. I liked putting words in her mouth. It\u2019s that way with all the characters, even the bad ones. In The Soul Thief<\/em>, there\u2019s this awful guy, Coolberg, but I really enjoyed being him, putting words in his mouth.<\/p>\n

How do you approach writing from the perspective of characters who are very different from you in terms of race, gender or sexuality?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was thinking tonight I would read part of \u201cAvarice,\u201d which is told by a fundamentalist Christian woman with breast cancer. I am not a fundamentalist Christian woman with breast cancer. I don\u2019t know how I can project myself into her, but when I started writing it, I thought, \u201cOh, I know who she is.\u201d And it was comfortable for me to put myself into her shoes, without mocking her. <\/p>\n

I think all of us have a spectrum of people we can imagine being. For some writers, the spectrum is very wide. They can imagine themselves as anybody. I\u2019m not like that. There are a lot of characters I don\u2019t generally find myself trying to be or to imagine. A sniper in Iraq–I wouldn\u2019t have the ghost of a clue how to do a character like that. Phil Klay can do it. I can\u2019t. One of the things about becoming a writer is that you end up knowing who you can do and who you can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also a huge fan of your craft essays. The first time I read \u201cAgainst Epiphanies,\u201d it blew my mind. The stories I had been reading and writing till that point were very much organized about the moment of epiphany.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was just saying you don\u2019t have to manufacture epiphanies. You can<\/em>, but you don\u2019t have to.<\/p>\n

Are you planning any more books of essays?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am.<\/p>\n

What are the current trends in fiction that you find yourself taking note of and wanting to explore?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve gotten interested in lush styles and the way that they get used. Obviously there\u2019s a lot of speculative fiction that\u2019s getting written right now, and I\u2019m interested in how and why that\u2019s happening. I gave a talk this summer on dramatic images. Images are often the first thing we think of when we think of a story, but they\u2019re often the last thing we think of putting into a story. Finally, I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about narrative urgency and how to get it into a story, and I\u2019ve been thinking about fugitive subjectivity, stories of uncanny hauntedness. <\/p>\n

In the Art of<\/em> series, Maud Casey just did an analysis of a novel in which a girl is beaten by her father. Over the course of the novel, her suffering gives her a kind of power to levitate. This reminded me of how Steven King\u2019s character Carrie is abused in high school, and her suffering has some relation to her magical powers. And I wondered where this connection between suffering and magical power was coming from. When you\u2019re an adolescent and people are mean to you, you may feel that you have a powerful inner life. We all wished when we were adolescents that this powerful inner life could do something<\/em>. Anything! What it actually does is to turn some people, but not everybody, into artists. <\/p>\n

When you\u2019re writing your own fiction, do you think about craft or try to silence that part of your brain?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I try to silence it. If I get into a terrible jam, I\u2019ll try to think my way out of it with some of the tools I\u2019ve put in the toolbox. I\u2019d rather work on instinct, but if I get stuck, I\u2019ll use everything I know, from my reading and everything I\u2019ve noticed that other writers have done. <\/p>\n

How does teaching affect your writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to say. If you\u2019ve taught for many years, you see some of the same problems continually arise in students\u2019 stories. I try to begin with a long description of what I think the work wants to be, and I do my best to describe it thematically and formally. This are the elements: first person, there are three scenes, there are x number of characters, the setting is not much used<\/em>… I\u2019ll just go through a description and then say, \u201cIt\u2019s my sense that this piece wants to do x.\u201d If a story stalls out, there are certain procedures you can employ to get it moving again. And I may apply that to my own work. I\u2019m not afraid of being prescriptive with my students. I\u2019ll make suggestions. They can ignore me. It\u2019s a free country.<\/p>\n

In a good workshop, you take on other people\u2019s stories, and you treat them as your own and say, \u201cHow would I solve this problem?\u201d That\u2019s a good exercise. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s good for you to do it year after year after year. I had a colleague at Michigan who was convinced that we would all have written many more novels if we weren\u2019t teaching these creative writing classes. I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s true. <\/p>\n

Last question: I love the humor in your fiction and essays. In your essay on rhyming action, I remember laughing out loud when I read the line about how poets write for half an hour a day, though I\u2019m sure the poets replied indignantly.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They don\u2019t like it when you say that the biggest problem poets have is what to do with the other 23 \u00bd hours of the day. <\/p>\n

There are great moments like that in this collection too, like the line, \u201cScientists should remain calm, even if they become sanctified.\u201d You have irony, but not the bitter kind. So how do you know when you\u2019ve struck the right note in being funny?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You\u2019re trying not to clown or make faces. You\u2019re trying not to force the tone. If there\u2019s something comic or humorous, it should come out of the truth of the situation. A friend of mine used to say it\u2019s the difference between surface funny and deep funny. <\/p>\n

We all have these circumstances when we\u2019re in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time. That\u2019s the way life is. It\u2019s funny. We shouldn\u2019t have been in that place. It shouldn\u2019t have happened that way, but it did. Or think of that moment when you blurt out exactly the wrong thing at Thanksgiving dinner. It just happened that way. Comedy can\u2019t be forced. That\u2019s why they are so few really good comic writers in this country. I think Charles Portis is a great comic writer. Dog of the South<\/em> and Masters of Atlantis<\/em>, he\u2019s a wonderful writer. Lorrie [Moore]\u2019s writing is very witty, brilliant, but I wouldn\u2019t describe it as comic by any means. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s humor as a defense mechanism.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Very much so. Many young women are armed only by their wit. That\u2019s the one weapon they have to deal with the world. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Baxter is the author of five novels, five collections of short stories, three collections of poems, and two collections of essays. He\u2019s the recipient of many awards and recognitions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His novel Feast of Love was a finalist for the National […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[46],"tags":[23],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-3fR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12515"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12515"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12564,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12515\/revisions\/12564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}