‘A willingness to cut or throw out has become a fetish in the MFA world:’ An Interview with Andrew Martin

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By Laura Whitmer

Andrew Martin joined Mountainview’s faculty in the summer of 2021. He is the author of the novel Early Work (2018) and the short story collection Cool for America (2020). He discussed the craft in writing real-life experiences, how to reject the all-or-nothing editing process, and the politics behind point-of-view with Laura Whitmer via video call.

Laura Whitmer: In preparation for our conversation, I read several other interviews you’ve done in the last few years. I was struck by how many people asked you about the role your real-life experiences influence your fiction. I’ve always felt like that’s a reductive question, but I understand people’s impulse to ask it. How do you feel about that question? What does it add to or take away from in a conversation about your work?

Andrew Martin: I think that’s such a good question, the meta version of it. Because to me, the real life is raw material that’s available to you as a writer and it’s kind of irrelevant, from a craft perspective, how much of it is true and based on your life. It’s really about how you use it and what you’re doing with it. If someone I know writes a book, I’m interested on a personal level, how much they’re using from their life, how they’re transforming it, and how they’re thinking about real life material. And I think it’s a valid craft question. How do you transform your life into art? How do you use what you know about the world, relationships, and friendships to make fiction? So, I wish people phrased it more the way you are. I do use biographical elements pretty heavily, at least in my initial setting out. I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. My wife was a medical student. I taught in a women’s prison. These things are true, but then from that basis, the perspective [in Early Work], the actual events, the way the character feels about his life, the way he thinks about the world, and the actions he takes based on that initial premise are different. So Early Work has a lot of that “what-if” thinking. What if, in this moment in my experience, this whole different set of elements was added, and this whole different set of thoughts and events came in?

 

LW: Early Work and Cool for America seem to orbit each other, with a handful of characters appearing in both books. What are you working on now, and do those characters inhabit the same universe?

AM: I’m working on stories right now. In the similar way that those two books coexist, I’m putting a lot of characters and ideas into a stew and seeing if a novel will emerge from it. None of the characters in the work I’m doing now come from the characters in those books, but the way I work is often that I’m writing scenes and characters and trying to figure out what I’m interested in. Then over time, sifting that into stories, into a novel, taking things out of novels and putting them aside, seeing if they can become stories. I have so much leftover material from the first two books that got shaved off. I think the new work feels like a continuation of the work from those two books, but they’re older versions of those characters, not specifically those characters. In some ways I’m following my own life trajectory, so my characters have gone from being in their mid to late twenties and early thirties into their mid-thirties. Grappling with some slightly more existential questions about what they’re doing with their lives. I’ve thought about calling my next thing “Other People’s Kids.” [Laughs]

 

LW: I think that’s a great title. How do you approach a story—or part of a story—that isn’t working?

AM: Oh gosh. Try everything! I feel like the number one thing that helps is putting it aside. It’s like when you’re working on a knot, and you pick at it and pick at it and you’re like, ‘I cannot look at this thing anymore. There’s no way this is ever going to get fixed.’ So then you just have to put it down. And then you give it a month, you give it a couple months. And you come back to it, and suddenly you can see it clearer, you can see it fresh. That can be really helpful. Or sometimes you can see that it’s not interesting enough or not going to work for you and you can put it aside. For me, dialogue and voice in general is such a huge part of what I do that reading it out loud and playing with the rhythms of it ends up being really helpful. If the story is not interesting for some reason, often the problem is in the prose, the voice, or the sound of it. So, trying to chop it up can help. First paragraphs are often really hard for me. I read a piece when we did our residency, and as I was reading it out loud, I realized the sentence lengths in the first paragraph were not right, and I was like, ‘Aw, shoot.’ [Laughs] Trying to break down the components can be useful. When you feel like, ‘Oh no, this thing is a mess, it’s not working,’ it’s like, okay, what’s not working? Which paragraph doesn’t feel right, and why? Once you find a little thing to work on, then you can start addressing the bigger questions, but you’ve got to take it into its constituent parts, otherwise you’re never going to do it, you know?

 

LW: Yeah. That’s helpful for me to hear, just personally right now as well. I think we all need that reminder.

AM: Yeah. I’m very dramatic, so it can feel very all or nothing. Like, this whole thing needs to go, and I also need a new career. [Laughs] But I think often it’s more like, no, that paragraph sucks, you just have to cut it. You have to be willing to cut. I think a willingness to cut or a willingness to throw out has become sort of a fetish in the MFA world. Like, ‘kill your babies.’ Or, ‘the best sentence in the piece, that’s the one you have to cut.’ But if it’s really good, then probably keep it. If something doesn’t work in the greater whole, if something doesn’t feel right in the context, you have to have that willingness to get rid of stuff, or a whole story, if it doesn’t work.

 

LW: What did you take from your MFA experience that you don’t think you could have gotten anywhere else?

AM: There were a couple of things. The one that truly changed my trajectory as a writer is that I worked with David Gates, who became one of my favorite fiction writers, and he was really the first person I’d ever worked with who brutally line-edited my work. His way of working was, he would hand you back your pages top to bottom covered in pen with the way he would’ve written it. So, it wasn’t like, ‘this is bad, this is wrong, this is whatever;’ it was, ‘if I was writing this story, here’s how I would do it.’ He’d scrawl rewritten versions of the dialogue, he’d cut words out of sentences, he’d cut paragraphs or move them around. He’d be like, cut everything after this line, cut these last two pages. He had an active editing instinct in a way that was really, really helpful because that’s more like how book editors edit and more like how really good magazine editors edit.

As a teacher, I don’t go that hard because I do feel a need to respect my students’ work more. And in that class, some students hated it. It was really a divide. To me, I thought it was life changing because even though I don’t think any of the stories from that first workshop ever saw the light of day, it gave me a template for how much pressure I needed to put on the stories. Not pressure in a bad sense, not anxiety, but physical pressure to make the story tighter, sharper, better.

And the second thing was my peers. I grew up in New Jersey and then was working at a magazine in New York, and so I was very much a part of the east coast literary/publishing world, and then I went to Montana for my MFA and met people from all over the country, a lot of people from the Midwest, from the West, from small towns. I went to an Ivy League school, I was part of a particular set, and I really thought I was such hot shit. [Laughs] It was really, really useful to meet people from all over, all walks of life, different kinds of education and backgrounds, all of whom were really good writers, and I was like, ‘Oh, my very privileged life does not privilege me in this sphere.’ You can be a great writer from all kinds of different places, and I learned so much from writers of different backgrounds and styles and everything else. It seems kind of obvious and almost embarrassing to have to learn that at twenty-five, but it was a wakeup call in a really good way.

 

LW: What has teaching taught you about your own writing?

AM: I’m continually renewed and energized by reading student work. To me, it’s a reminder of the possibilities of what you can do. As a writer, I feel so trapped in my own head a lot of the time. I think that’s one of the professional hazards of the job. So, what’s cool about teaching is that suddenly you’re seeing a student take a whole different path, a whole different approach to writing fiction, and they’re trying things you hadn’t thought of. Also, it’s very hard to take your own medicine, but that’s happened to me a bunch of times, where I’m saying to a student, ‘You need to read it out loud, you need to think it through, you need to take it paragraph by paragraph’ and I’m like, wait a minute, I could do that!

 

LW: You’ve spoken previously about your tendency to write female characters from a close-third POV and male characters from a first-person POV. Do you feel like writing a female character in first-person is inauthentic, or a line you can’t cross, even in fiction?

AM: It’s an interesting thing. I don’t think I’m not crossing that line out of any political reason. I don’t think it’s because I’m afraid of appropriating the perspective because I’m doing that just as much if I’m writing in close-third, really. I’m inhabiting the character’s thoughts. It’s something that I want to figure out how to do. It’s relatively rare. It’s kind of surprising how rare it is to see people writing first person across their gender identity. And I don’t know why. One of the great exceptions is Mating by Norman Rush, which is this amazing, very long first-person female-narrated novel written by a man. But I think there’s something about claiming that ‘I’ and the intimacy of ‘I’ that I find difficult to do if it’s not a character who, forget even the gender part, kind of resembles me specifically. I’ve never written an ‘I’ character who’s twenty years older than me, you know? Whenever I write ‘I,’ it’s a character who’s around my age and perspective. I’ll use close-third for younger versions of myself or projected older versions of a character like me. The female characters I write, I feel very close to and might be almost more autobiographical in a lot of ways. I think the removed aspect of third person helps you be more honest in some ways because you’re not stuck with what would this character literally say, but what’s a slightly deeper level of their consciousness.

LW: What are you reading right now?

AM: I just read this hilarious and sad novel by the British writer J.R. Ackerley called We Think the World of You. I also just finished a galley of a friend’s book called The Midcoast [Adam White, forthcoming 2022] about crime in small town Maine and it’s really good. I now know a lot more about how to run drugs from Canada than I used to, so I’m guessing that’ll be useful.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Laura Whitmer is currently developing her fiction craft at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. She currently lives in Massachusetts.

‘I’m drawn to social interactions that nag like a hangnail:’ An Interview with Gemma Sieff

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By Laura Whitmer

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Writer and reviewer Gemma Sieff rejoined the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA’s faculty in the summer of 2021 after completing her own MFA in Fiction at the University of Iowa. In a video call with Laura Whitmer, Sieff discussed her writing process, how she found community through teaching, and the persisting sincerity of Justin Bieber.

Laura Whitmer: I want to start with your i-D essay on Justin Bieber. I feel like the piece celebrates him in a way the media, or other commentary I’ve seen about him, doesn’t. Can you talk about the process of writing celebrity into your work?

Gemma Sieff: It’s funny because he’s having such a continued moment now. He’s settled down and seems to be grown up and happy. I mean, who knows, with celebrities you’re always just getting what they project, but I do feel like I saw the good in Justin Bieber. [Laughs] Actually it’s not fair to claim that because he was already getting a lot of attention for his music then, but he was closer to his scandals. I was just taken by his sincerity. I remember that summer, and still today, he writes a lot of God stuff on his Instagram. Like, ‘everything in you, God gave you, so you can handle any challenge.’ It’s sort of relentlessly positive in a way that, for some reason, I find really sincere. Some of that stuff will rub me the wrong way, and I feel like it all sounds like pablum. Maybe it’s just his angelic, sweet voice and horribly good looks or something, but he strikes me as a sincere person.

I can’t remember how they approached me for [the piece]. They wanted to do a style icons thing. You’re looking at me right now, and my look has migrated away from Bieber, but at the time I had spiky blonde hair and I had just gone on this bad Hinge date and [the Bieber comparison] was the highlight of the Hinge date. So he was on my mind, and then I did a deeper internet dive on the latest news about him. The piece turned out funnier than I expected. I expected going into it that I would write it in a more adulatory tone. I wrote the piece at a weird time where I was living at home. My mom was really ill and I hadn’t been writing at all. I remember feeling quite out of practice, and then when I sat down, I just wanted to write something that felt fun, light, not too serious. But I feel like there is something interesting you can do with that in fiction as well. Because these characters do feel almost avatar-like and we project so much onto them. Obviously, anyone writing about a celebrity is mostly writing about themselves.

 

LW: How do you know when an experience is going to turn into something you write about?

GS: I’m drawn to awkwardness, embarrassment, social interactions that nag like a hangnail. I wouldn’t say I try to find the humor in them, but awkwardness and embarrassment is funny. Usually, you have to have a little bit of distance from it and if you’re fictionalizing it, you want to abstract it enough or blur it. I do write from my life experiences, and I’m drawn to experiences that nag at me, where I feel I behaved badly, and/or someone else behaved badly. I think whether it’s personal essay or it’s fiction, that’s the best place to try to explore those things because they’re not think pieces and they’re not non-fiction. They’re ambiguous awkwardness that you want to try to, if not explain, describe as accurately as you can.

 

LW: When did you feel like, “I am a writer”?

GS: I don’t feel like one. I have severe imposter syndrome. I was an editor for nine years in New York City, and I never had any problems saying, “I’m an editor.” Then I was freelance, and even getting to Iowa and being a student again, I felt shy about it. I don’t know why. I suppose maybe it’s because I don’t have a book to my name. But sometimes you hear that from people who have published books, that they suffer from… What is the Simone Biles term? The yips or the twisties. Perhaps I have a bit of imposter syndrome because I haven’t entirely figured out what kind of writer I am. I worked on short stories at Iowa, and fiction felt really new. It was the steepest learning curve. I hadn’t written much fiction in a long time. I came out of those two years feeling like, ‘Oh my god, I know even less than when I went in,’ which I think is sometimes the K-shaped learning curve they talk about with stuff. It was so immersive and so excellent, and the instruction there is amazing, but there’s no paint by numbers for writing of any kind.

 

LW: What made you decide to get your MFA in fiction instead of non-fiction?  

GS: I had been writing some nonfiction that people kept telling me read like fiction. And at the time, I felt a little shy about mining my life for material that I was calling nonfiction. Which isn’t to say that would preclude writing a memoir in the future. Maybe my feelings will change. I had one experience that I wrote as a long nonfiction piece and it nearly went to press, and then for certain legal reasons, it was held. And I came to feel quite relieved that that had happened. Because had that been published as it was, I might have been quite embarrassed to have put that out there just as straight memoir or nonfiction. So, I applied to Iowa with this long piece that I had then fictionalized in various ways. I’m still working on a version of it because I haven’t gotten it right yet, but with that experience, it felt like there could be a way to write more truthfully about it if I could say it was fiction. In some ways I think the burden of truth on fiction is almost steeper. You want the author to invite you in even more because there’s no excuse for the author not to if you’re calling something fiction. I’m not sure if I’ve solved that problem in this particular piece, but that was my initial impulse for applying [in fiction].

 

LW: What influence has teaching had on your own creative practice? 

GS: At Iowa, I taught four semesters, and I really liked the teaching aspect of [the program.] I found it gave my weeks some balance and structure. I taught the required humanities course for non-English majors, and it was great to get a bunch of kids who didn’t necessarily think they liked reading and certainly didn’t want to be reading a syllabus of literature. I did away with everything MLA. I had them write hybrid essays that brought in experiences in their lives. For instance, I taught this book Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, which is an unbelievable account of his thirteenth year in England in the early eighties. It’s a masterful document of a very awkward time in life. But it was cool because this was not a landscape my students were familiar with. There’s tons of British slang. It’s a long book, and we read it slowly, but for the most part they found it really rewarding by the end. The emotional payoff was high. Teaching has helped with writing fiction and otherwise because you’re reading really good stuff, and you’re taking it apart, dismantling it, talking about it in the most granular way you can. And at Mountainview, it’s so wonderful to work with so many passionate writers who just love to write and love to read. My students are amazing. Teaching reminds you that you are part of a community. It’s not quite as lonely as you think. Other people are reading things closely and as passionately as you, if not more so.

LW: You’ve published a lot of great book reviews. Do you approach a book differently if you know you’re going to review it? What is that process like?

GS: That’s a great question. I typically read it twice and mark it up less analytically than emotionally. If I don’t really believe something the writer has said, if it feels thin, I’ll express my impatience in the margins or vice versa. I remember I reviewed Priestdaddy for the Times, and that book was covered in my handwriting because Patricia Lockwood is just so wonderful. I was so moved and excitedly articulate in the margins of that book. It had a very conversational feel.

LW: What are you working on now?

GS: I’m revising short stories that I worked on at Iowa. It’s not a full-length manuscript, so I need to do some more writing as I continue to revise. I also wrote a television pilot, and I’m heading to L.A. to talk to people about writers’ rooms and TV writing and how to get involved in that. I’m interested in that. I think it would be hard but fun.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Laura Whitmer is currently developing her fiction craft at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. She currently lives in Massachusetts.

'The one quality I can't abide in fiction is humorlessness:' An Interview with 'Sensation Machines' Author Adam Wilson

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By Aaron Calvin

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The writer Adam Wilson has made a career plumbing the depths of the human tragicomedy. His first novel, Flatscreen (2012), is an unlikely meditation of life filtered through the claustrophobic world of a stoner hiding from the world. His story collection What’s Important is Feeling (2014) is rife with memorable characters portrayed with dark wit in a bleak suburban milieu. His new novel, Sensation Machines (2020), was published in a world gripped with pandemic and recession, reinforcing the novels effortlessly zeitgeist-y plot, which follows a pair of wealthy Brooklynites against the backdrop of a collapsing late-capitalist America.

The distanced press tour for Sensation Machines has included interview with Full Stop, InsideHook, and Bomb Magazine. Wilson fielded a few questions for Assignment via email concerning his new novel and the craft of fiction.

Aaron Calvin: Students at Mountainview are familiar with your craft talks on humor and your talent as a humorist shines through in Sensation Machines. Every little phrase that prompts a laugh also feels like it's using the absurd to crack open a little window into a sadness that wouldn't hit quite the same if you'd just stated that sadness straight on. Is humor a device that can be deployed to show us something that would be perhaps too painful to state head on?  

Adam Wilson: Definitely. Humor can do so many things in a novel. As you say, it can make pain more palatable, and maybe also more palpable by locating it within a more dynamic emotional field. It can also cut against potential sentimentality, protecting your sadness from tipping into bathos. And it can be used to cover up deficiencies in other areas—I’m willing to forgive a lot if a book makes me laugh, and I bank on the fact that my readers are too.

I’ve always said that the one quality I can't abide in fiction is humorlessness. This doesn’t mean the books I like are all funny, necessarily, but I think they all present some fundamental awareness of the absurdity of human life, the sheer ridiculousness of it. I dunno, maybe it’s because I come from British Jews, but irony—along with beans on toast, and not having a foreskin—feels like a part of my birthright, and I feel an urge to defend it from the growing armies of the drippily sincere. There’s a seeming misconception that for art to be serious it must be either sober and dull or drunk and lachrymose, and because of this we tend to celebrate a lot of joyless, boring work. This feels especially true in the current climate, in which the magnitude of our crises would seem to demand our utmost solemnity. But to me, the writers who most successfully engage with big serious questions about society and humanity tend to do so with at least some sense of irony. Well, maybe not the Russians, but that’s kinda their thing.

AC: There are so many great moments in this novel where cultural theory is filtered through the characters, particularly when it comes to Michael and his obsession with the rapper Eminem. What does theorizing through a character allow you to do differently than, say, a straight-ahead essay on the subject?

AW: It allows you to temper the self-seriousness I tend to associate with cultural theory, and it protects you from the onus of having it add up to a concrete thesis. Fiction is more forgiving of ambiguity than criticism, so the writer can work through ideas without the pressure of landing on a clear takeaway. Eminem is a good example. I’ve thought a lot about him—enough that this thinking made its way into a novel—but if I were forced at gunpoint to provide a verdict on his cultural value, I’d end up with a bullet through the ears. 

AC: The novel is written primarily through two characters, a married couple, but diverges at various points into different POVs. How did the process of writing a book that brings in so many viewpoints work? Did you begin with one character and expand from there?

AW: From the beginning I knew that I wanted to write a book with a lot of characters in it. My first novel, Flatscreen, is told from the perspective of a twenty year-old stoner who rarely leaves his mother’s suburban basement and has learned everything he knows from TV and movies. I wanted the book to feel insular, borderline claustrophobic. By the time I’d finished writing it  I was ready for some air, and for a different kind of challenge. Add to that, I knew that writing the protagonists I’d envisioned—a derivatives trader and a marketing strategist, both wealthy white Brooklynites—meant exploring questions of privilege. As a way of underscoring that privilege, it seemed useful to offer the perspectives others New Yorkers, people whose lives my protagonists’ privilege had insulated them from having to consider in any kind of depth. Figuring out the logistics of how all this would work took a long time. I tried different approaches, used different novels as models. What I eventually landed on felt like the most plausible shape from which to attempt the impossible task I’d assigned myself, to write a novel that somehow managed to feel both sprawling and intimate.

AC: The plot structure of the novel is an interesting one. There are two acts, the first told through two first person POVs and then a second act told in a close third person among a variety of characters. Then there's the epilogue/ conclusion with its own movements in time. Through it all, the plot is constantly surging forward, propelled by a strong sense of urgency. What was the process of fine-tuning the movements of characters and their actions through time and space like? Did that develop in the initial drafting process or was it fine-tuned in revision? 

AW: Revision, revision, and more revision. And then more revision. The initial draft was a mess. The second draft was a mess. I’d say by the fourth draft it was less of a mess, but there were still quite a few kinks to work out. I don’t know how many drafts I ended up writing, or even what technically counts as a draft, but the book took nearly nine years from conception to publication, and it may have also taken my soul.

AC: The process of world building when it comes to the near-future seems rife with challenges. The world of Sensation Machines is made up of certain satirical exaggerations and certain aspects of today's world taken to their logical conclusions in order to reveal their absurdity, particularly when it comes to targeted advertising and data mining. What was the process of building this near-future world like and how did your world-building process work? Was it vindicating or disturbing to publish a book set in the United States amid a meltdown crisis period that strongly resonates with the present moment? 

AW: The process was fun at first, and then gradually grew more challenging as the world started shifting so rapidly that it became impossible to keep up, let alone project ahead. I’m glad you feel like the book resonates with the current moment, though—I really feel like it could have gone either way! I’m not sure it’s felt vindicating or disturbing so much as just frustrating. It would have been much nicer to publish the book into a world where bookstores still function at full capacity.  

Adam Wilson is the author of three books: the novel Sensation Machines (Soho 2020), the novel Flatscreen (Harper Perennial 2012) and the collection of short stories What’s Important is Feeling (Harper Perennial 2014). He teaches at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program among other programs.

'You Never Know What Will Live on the Page, and What Will Die:' Benjamin Nugent discusses 'Fraternity'

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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.