By Caroline Henley

This summer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Mountainview Low Residency MFA Program Director Benjamin Nugent’s Fraternity, a short story collection set within the beer-soaked halls of the Delta Zeta Chi chapter at UMass Amherst. Nugent has embarked on a memorable book tour, engaging in fascinating conversations with other notable writers. He has gone long on craft in his interviews, introducing ideas that are often hidden from the mainstream behind the closed doors of a writer’s workshop.

The digital Fraternity tour could be used to haze any neophyte MFA student. Nugent told Esquire that creating a unique character requires “isolating frequencies in yourself and seeing what happens when you let it talk.” Earlier this year, Nugent likened George Saunders’ dynamic story “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” to the tentacles of a decapitated octopus in The Paris Review: “The whole creature is a sack full of brains.” Nugent live-streamed with The New Yorker’s Naomi Fry on Instagram, and compared the anti-feminism of Leonard Michaels' characters in The Men's Club with the thorny themes explored in his stories. He was grilled on the corporeal by fellow Mountainview faculty member Rebecca Schiff through the Zoom account of Ann Arbor’s Literati Bookstore. He described writing to the rhythm of Men Without Hats’ “The Safety Dance” while working on the story “Safe Spaces” with The Rumpus. But certainly he does not want music—he agreed with author Andrew Martin during their Harvard Bookstore conversation that they both have to turn off the record player before picking up the pen.

Under the lens of Fraternity, Nugent offers Assignment readers additional ideas and devices to consider when approaching the blank page: The benefits of setting rules, the potential of pastiche, and one way to guide characters towards breakthrough moments.

Caroline Henley: In Mountainview's Scene vs Summary craft class, you introduced the idea of making rules about framing and word choice to spur creativity. We read a passage from Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, "A good realtor says 'home'. Never 'house'. Always 'cellar' and never 'basement'..." The passage goes on along that rule, contrasting the phrases that a realtor should and shouldn't say. Were there any rules that you made for yourself in these stories that played out in interesting ways? Oprah's use of the first person plural "we" throughout the story "God" comes to mind.

Benjamin Nugent: Yeah, sure, one of the rules that structures “God” is that Oprah, the narrator, never confronts the fact that he is gay or queer until the very end of the story, but that his gayness or queerness is increasingly evident to the reader because of the way he behaves and the way he processes the world around him. There is an ongoing discrepancy between the reader’s knowledge of who he is and his knowledge of himself; the reader knows a bit more than he does. That kind of dramatic irony can be totally uninteresting, a cheap joke. But in the case of “God” it worked. You never know what will live, on the page, and what will die.

CH: What elements of these stories are autobiographical, if at all? Are we allowed to ask fiction authors that question?

BN: Sure, yeah, it’s a perfectly interesting question. Fraternity expresses emotions that are incredibly personal, but not by relating the events of my life. Just as you can express how you feel via a painting or photograph of something other than yourself, so you can express very personal emotions by portraying a life whose circumstances are totally different from your own. Fiction is only interesting to me if it’s personal. But for some writers, the expression of personal feelings occurs via autobiography, and for others it occurs via flight from autobiography. I stand more toward the latter end of the spectrum. I was not in a fraternity. I didn’t go to a college that had fraternities. But I did grow up a ten minute walk from UMass Amherst, where the book takes place, and I did live surrounded by fraternities and sororities in Iowa City for two years, and I did a lot of research and interviews, so I had some sense of how to use them as tools of self-expression.

CH: "Zach arrived late because he'd been upstairs, lying on his bed, talking with his mother on the phone about whether or not he should buy an electric toothbrush." One of my favorite relationships in these stories is that of Zach and his mother in "Basics." The story takes a dark turn, and the mother offers her son some questionable advice. What do you think makes the mother/son family dynamic so rich for satire?

BN: For me, the mother/young-man-son relationship was interesting to explore in the context of the #MeToo movement and the increased scrutiny of fraternities and their ethics. My feeling wasn’t, I want to satirize this mother, or satirize the dynamic between her and her son. It was, What an emotionally intense and difficult position this woman is in. On one hand, one’s loyalty to one’s child must be essentially absolute, and it’s not like her son has intentionally hurt anyone. On the other hand, in a case of an incident that might be considered sexual assault, one should generally side with the woman, not the man, and maybe she feels that even more than I do because is a woman. That was what made the conversation between her and Zach emotionally rich for me. My question was, How would she navigate this situation, and what would be her range of involuntary emotional responses to it? I just wanted to show, honestly, what I thought she would say. I didn’t consider her stupid or evil at all. I considered her realistic and well-informed and protective, and I considered her to be, with a certain amount of suffering and sadness, putting her political idealism aside in the moment of her child having potentially derailed his own life.

CH: You've mentioned that "Safe Spaces" is a pastiche of John Cheever's "The Swimmer." What do you admire about that Cheever story? Can you talk through how "Safe Spaces" came about, and which directions you took Claire in as you worked on the story? What do you think is exciting for fiction writers attempting pastiche?

BN: I admire many things about “The Swimmer”. One of them is that Cheever invents a remarkable generative constraint. His protagonist wakes up hungover at a friend’s house, having partied there late into the night, and decides to swim home, across his suburb, via his neighbors’ swimming pools, insofar as possible. He regards himself as popular in his suburb, and he’s confident that his neighbors won’t mind his sauntering onto their lawns and swimming in their pools. So the story is a series of episodes of his showing up at people’s houses and jumping into their pools, and the conversations that ensue. As long as he is pursuing that whimsical activity, he can remain in denial about the facts of his own life. In the pools, in the backyards, he experiences a sense of safety, belonging. Meanwhile, his life is not actually safe. He does not actually belong, or won’t for long. But he hides that from himself. I liked the idea of Claire leaping from safe space to safe space, whether to safe space was a library bathroom or a progressive political meeting or a frat.

A tangent: People seem to think I intended to end the collection on an up note by having Claire fall asleep on the floor of a frat house at the end. This was not intended as an up note.

I think it’s exciting to attempt pastiche when you think you can use the device of an old story to say something new. For me, the concept of “safe space” was incredibly rich and interesting and the idea of someone jumping from safe space to safe space all while in the throes of a substance abuse problem intrigued me.

CH: These stories have wonderfully detailed passages of speculation, such as Oprah's vision of all the fraternity brothers joining the same consulting firm after graduation, or the freshman in "Cassiopeia" worrying that the anarchists on campus are lonely. You seem to be drawn to adding these moments of speculation in all your stories. What attracts you to writing through speculation?

BN: I think people are constantly telling themselves stories in order to make sense of the world around them also to comfort themselves and escape reality. In particular, people do this when they are lonely, isolated. What a breakthrough moment with another person can do is cut through all the speculative narratives you have used to comfort yourself and blind yourself. When you’re falling in love, or even just discovering a new friendship, sometimes, it’s like the other person takes your glasses, wipes them off, and hands them back to you, and suddenly you can see the world clearly, your delusions are temporarily cleared away. At least, that’s the good way to fall in love or make a new friend, I think. So showing someone indulging a lonely speculation sets them up for a clarifying encounter with another person, an encounter that will, if they are lucky, dispel some illusions, even if that moment of clarity is a painful one.

Caroline Henley is a writer and student at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn with her cats, her husband, and her neighbor, Michelle Williams.