{"id":3788,"date":"2011-04-01T00:01:44","date_gmt":"2011-04-01T05:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"\/nashvillereview\/?p=3788"},"modified":"2015-03-25T21:06:00","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T03:06:00","slug":"peel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/3788","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with Lydia Peelle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lydia Peelle’s debut story collection, <\/em>Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, was a\u00a0New York Times<\/em> Editors\u2019 Choice book, a finalist for the Orion Book Award, and received an honorable mention for the 2010 PEN\/Hemingway Award. Peelle is also the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, a 2009 National Book Foundation \u201c5 under 35\u201d honoree and a 2010 recipient of a Whiting Award. <\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Interviewer: There is a strong sense of place in many of your stories: often the setting itself feels like its own character. In your writing process, or in a story like \u201cSweethearts of the Rodeo,\u201d which tends to come first? Characters or location? Or are the two often married together?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Peelle-photo_1[1]\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peelle: In the beginning I always see at least one character moving through a landscape, but often for a long time it stays that way\u2014<\/span>just one character\u2014before the story builds around him or her. But yes, for me the place is as important as anything else in the story. I’ve got to see it and know it before I can really move on with anything else. I think that our place\u2014that is, the people and history, industry, altitude and architecture,\u00a0flora and fauna, geology and sky of wherever we might happen to find ourselves on a particular morning\u2014greatly influences what we do, the choices we make, the moods we fall in to\u2014in both conscious and subconscious ways. I am interested in exploring that in my fiction.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: Many of your stories focus on highly specific lives\/tasks\/functions in the world. I\u2019m thinking of the carnival workers, the woman in \u201cKidding Season.\u201d Do you do research when crafting your stories? Or do you typically write from your own experiences?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>Peelle: I never did any specific research for any of the stories, instead drawing on limited knowledge based on past experiences, conversations, etc. One of the greatest things about writing is trying to enter these other lives\u2014to imagine what it is to be a miner, or an acrobat, or\u00a0a sixty-five year old divorced man\u2014and though of course you can never be fully successful in that imagining, it’s an excellent form of daydreaming.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: The characters in your stories are very different from one another, but what I think makes them so believable is their sense of frailty, of humanness and flaw. There is clearly so much concern and empathy for these people, but at the same time you don\u2019t try to make them prettier than they are. How do your characters tend to reveal themselves to you? Your characters feel like they continue existing past the end of the story.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>Peelle: It takes a long time, and a lot of pages, for characters to become fully real to me. In the case of Cole in \u201cThe Still Point,\u201d who is a thirty-something year old man still haunted by his twin brother’s death\u00a0when they were teenagers, I probably wrote four other stories about him to get to the one. I wrote a story\u00a0about them as children, I wrote one about him and his mother shortly after the death of his twin, I wrote another of him in adulthood. Though \u201cThe Still Point\u201d was the only one that\u00a0actually got finished, it\u00a0was probably number three\u00a0in that lineup, chronologically.\u00a0 I guess my philosophy would be that\u00a0it is actually somewhat rare to hit upon a fictional character who really interests you as a writer. So, when the great blessing happens and you find him, why not stick with him for a while?<\/p>\n

Interviewer: Have you ever had difficulty writing a character in so far as you had to let go because he\/she wasn’t revealing his\/herself? Have you ever scrapped a character because you didn\u2019t want him\/her around anymore?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peelle: Sure, yes, all the time\u2014characters, whole stories, whole novels have been scrapped. Scrapping is a good thing, I think, but you’ve got to be sort of reckless about it. You’ve got to light it on fire and throw it over the cliff, and know that it wasn’t all in vain, that it all will go into the compost of the next thing.\u00a0To continue with the above, I really do think it’s rare to hit on a character who is really hot for you\u2014who you think about even when you’re not writing. And that it takes\u00a0lots of\u00a0false starts and doors that open to nothing in order to find him.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: Are there any characters you\u2019ve written thus far that you feel need more life? That you\u2019d be interested in continuing on with in a future story?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peelle: I don’t know. I know that\u00a0some of the characters in the stories feel decidedly\u00a0closed<\/em> to me\u2014that I have wrestled and wrestled with them, and I’m certainly happy that they’re around, but I definitely wouldn’t want to\u00a0run into\u00a0them at a party or a bus stop. They’ve said all they have to say to me, and I to them.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: You\u2019re currently working on a novel. How does this process differ for you from writing short stories? Do you make use of an outline, write chronologically? Set goals or endpoints?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peelle: Ah, outlines, chronology, goals and endpoints! Sometimes I feel like I’m reinventing the wheel every day. I’ll spend two weeks agonizing over something and then think, oh, I should just take some notes about what’s happening here, sketch it out, sort of like…an outline! It’s never a conscious decision to plan, but I always find it helps so much when I do it. I think I should tape a note above my desk, or get a tattoo on my wrist, that says “Plan It Out.”<\/p>\n

Interviewer: As far as the decision to write in the first person versus the third person, what do you feel motivates this decision?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peelle: My story \u201cKidding Season\u201d started out in the first person, went through a dozen drafts, switched to the third person present tense, went through a dozen drafts, and then finally, just before publication, I rewrote it in the third person past tense. I agree with you that it is a great exercise to change the point of view, or the tense, that you’re working with.\u00a0But give it time to\u00a0cool before\u00a0working on it again.\u00a0Time is the greatest thing for a story. Put it away. Forget about it. Come back to it in a year. Now, if I could only follow my own advice. The tendency of course is to want to see it done. For the satisfaction of it and also because of the fear that the spark will go out. But if a story’s really got something, the spark won’t go out, even after years in a drawer.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: Many professional writers seem to join academia\u2014teaching at MFA programs and so forth. Have you ever considered teaching? When you were completing your MFA at University of Virginia, how did you find the experience of teaching and writing at the same time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peelle: I taught English, first at a high school and then to 5th, 6th, and 8th graders, in the years between college and graduate school. So I love teaching, and I also loved teaching a fiction writing course for undergraduates while at UVA. Being an English teacher\u00a0was a wonderful learning experience, in so many ways. I had to really brush up on my grammar, for example, and got to re-read so many of the books that made me fall in love with literature when I was younger. And being with kids all day constantly challenges you to question\u00a0your perceptions of the world, which is a good thing if you’re writing. But I was always so exhausted at the end of those school days that I could not even pick up a\u00a0pen to write. Whenever I meet\u00a0writers who also teach grade school or high school, I am utterly amazed by them and have the greatest respect for them. They seem to all get up at the most ungodly hour of the morning in order to write before school. It’s almost superhuman, what they do. I wasn’t able to do it.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: When deciding which stories to include in your collection, you clearly had an overarching theme in mind. When you were beginning to figure out which stories to include, were there particular ones you knew had to be a part of the collection?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peelle: I didn’t start thinking about the shape of a collection until fairly late in the process. There are lots of stories that did not make it into the book, but only one story that I finished specifically because I knew the book needed it\u2014\u201cThis is Not a Love Story.\u201d I saw that story as a small keystone that would (at least for me) hold the rest of the stories together.<\/p>\n

Interviewer: There is something very natural and primal about your stories, like an innate, unsympathetic forward momentum. I think it\u2019s beautiful how even though there is this sort of unflinching collective portrayal of the world, we\u2019re given this title Reasons of and Advantages of Breathing,<\/em> which feels sort of hopeful. When you look at this collection do you feel like you are making an overall statement? Or rather, when you were compiling the stories to include did the connections feel natural? Was there ever a moment of, “Oh, I didn\u2019t realize how connected my thoughts on existence were?”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peelle: I think so much of the writing process is the startling discovery of\u00a0the phenomenon you mention\u00a0here\u2014of just how connected one’s thoughts on existence are. Put another way, it always amazes me, when I look back at different things I’ve written, how predictable\u00a0my patterns of thinking are\u2014or maybe a better word is consistent. I think writing is a great act of self-discovery, in that sense, without meaning to sound too analytical or Freudian about it. It can be like waking up in the morning to find your bed covered with blueprints of your dreams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lydia Peelle’s debut story collection, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, was a\u00a0New York Times Editors\u2019 Choice book, a finalist for the Orion Book Award, and received an honorable mention for the 2010 PEN\/Hemingway Award. Peelle is also the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, a 2009 National Book Foundation \u201c5 under […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"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":[8],"tags":[23],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6Jypy-peel","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3788"}],"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\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3788"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11815,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3788\/revisions\/11815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}