Yatterings

Christopher Barzak’s debut novel, One for Sorrow, has just been published in the States and he was kind enough to answer a couple of questions regarding his writing.
In “What we know about the lost families of — House” in Interfictions, you mention it came from coming back to your home town after travelling. Did the dislocation help you at all with thinking about the static nature of certain parts of home? How did your participation the Interfictions project come about?

After I came home from Japan, I did definitely notice some of the static, or unchanging, aspects of my hometown. The old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” really makes sense to me now. Though it had more of a twist for me personally. I think to some extent, what I found when I returned home is that even if huge things changed in a place–like a nearby neighbor who owned the woods that bordered the north end of our place sold it while I was away and it was cut down, hundreds of trees that were part of my childhood adventures–the parts of me that grew up there are still there, even after years of growing up in other places outside of the little town where my family lives. So it was a nice revelation really, to come back and also have all the memories still there despite some of the changes in the physicality of the place itself, to be able to recognize something both in myself that is permanent as well as in a place.

As for the Interfictions anthology, there was an open call for submissions, and since I have been interested in the Interstitial Arts Foundations’ ideas and way of looking at various modes of art and literature and music since its inception, I sent a story to the editors that I felt was somehow an interstitial piece of fiction–a haunted house story, an oral history, a fractured narrative that pays homage to both William Faulkner and Shirley Jackson.

In The Flood in the Foundation anthology, you present the reader with the need to make a choice. Does this reflect a position that we face now?

I do think it reflects a position that we face now, in regards to the harsh beginning of the twenty-first century. A ruined New Orleans, a seemingly unending war, a bridge collapsing in Minneapolis, coal miners trapped in a mountain, dying, a devastating tsunami in 2004, thousands of families homes taken away from them because of what I think of as legal criminal activity among our mortgage lenders here in the U.S., a government who blames it on poor people who want houses they can’t afford instead of on the deliberate misleading nature of the wealthy lenders, an unending litany of disasters and terror. Really, the twenty-first century feels like a flood to me, a sink or swim flood that doesn’t seem like it’s going to end anytime soon. Some people might say that’s just life, and so it is, but wow, doesn’t it feel like the water is really rising higher and higher?

How do you approach writing - either short stories or novels?

I approach writing, whether it’s a short story or a novel, with the hope that each time I sit down to write, I’ll be as surprised and entertained and maddened and crushed or falling in love with characters as I want my readers to feel when they read things I’ve written. If I’m not feeling those things as I write, I can’t expect readers to feel them. So I try to approach writing, you might say, as a reader, wanting it to be fun and meaningful and scary all at the same time.

Who are you reading at the moment? Who are your influences?

Right now I’m reading Nikolai Gogol’s collection of stories called “The Overcoat”. My influences are Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Carroll, Jonathan Lethem, Graham Joyce, Jeffrey Ford, Richard Bowes, Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler, Shirley Jackson, Sherwood Anderson, Kevin Brockmeier, Tillie Olsen, Jeanette Winterson, Haruki Murakami, Aimee Bender, David Mitchell, Raymond Carver, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isak Dinesen, M. Rickert, A.S. Byatt, A.L. Kennedy and lots lots more.

There is a generation of writers who are increasingly comfortable with various genres and media. Do you think that this will affects writing or gives it new techniques?

I hope so. I think that as film became increasingly popular, writers became more adept at writing novels that have an almost filmic quality, with incredible cleanness and framing that film has, and angles or points of view that seem take from film and applied as a technique somehow in writing. I think the internet and everything that goes along with it will probably change it or bring new techniques for writers as well. I think eventually there’ll be a bigger audience for multi-media projects because of things like the internet too. And genres seem to keep getting blurrier, which I think is cool. I like blurriness.

Given your involvement in the Interfictions and Foundation anthologies, how do you think about genre? Is it important or a secondary event?

Well, as I said, I like blurriness. I like writing fiction that skates around various genres, sometimes going straight through their territories, other times just around the edges, and oftentimes starting out in one kind of story and ending up in another. I like that feeling as a reader, that all of these various kinds of stories are really connected, and you can cross back and forth between them, rather than feel restricted to stay in one place. I like stories that really change shape as you read them. So in a way, genre is both important and secondary. Important because I love a lot of different genres, and all of their rules and conventions and kinds of stories they tell, but I also like to pick and choose from those rules and conventions, to mix them up and match them with some other kind of genre and see what kind of weird blend they may make together. So basically it’s knowing and loving the various sets of stories, but not feeling compelled to make all of my decisions in my writing process according to just one of those genres.

What was the genesis of One for Sorrow?

A friend of mine died in our mid-twenties, and at the same time I was going through a lot of changes in my life, and it all recalled a similar time when I was a kid and a local boy around my age was murdered in the woods on his way home from a Boy Scout meeting. I wrote a short story called “Dead Boy Found” at that time, when I was twenty-four, which was published in Kelly Link’s anthology, Trampoline. It was a dark and claustrophobic sort of story. A few years later when I was twenty-seven, I decided to continue writing that story, letting the narrator, Adam go forward in his story until he could find himself in more light and feeling less claustrophobic about living.

How did you come to writing?

I’m really not sure I came to it, but that it was just a part of me since I was a little kid. I used to draw pictures in sequence and staple or thread them together for my parents and after I learned to read and write I stopped drawing and began writing the stories instead. And I wrote like that, as something I really enjoyed doing, since then, through elementary school and junior high and high school and college and graduate school. At a certain point soon after my undergraduate degree was over, I went to some writing workshops and conventions, and became part of the writing world that way too. I started publishing stories when I was twenty-four, in little magazines like Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. And then in internet magazines like Strange Horizons. Then I had some stories selected for Year’s Best anthologies, and I kept writing and publishing and wrote my first novel, and here I am, and really glad to be here, still writing after all these years.