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Tag Archives: author interviews
Visiting Hart's Grove
This week, we’re catching up with author Dennis McFadden’s, whose debut fiction-collection, Hart’s Grove, is just out from Colgate University Press. Snag your copy here. Dennis’s story, “The Three-Sided Penny” appeared in The Missouri Review’s Winter 2007 issue, which you can purchase here. He lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, off Peaceable Street, just up from Harmony Corners, and took a few minutes this month to let us know how it feels to be a debut author. This interview was conducted by one of our summer interns, Andrea Waterfield.
1) You work as a project manager for New York State. Do you ever find yourself bringing experiences from your daily job into your writing?
For the most part, no. Work is work and fiction is fiction and never the twain shall meet. Well, never say never. I did write one story called “Building 8″ the protagonist of which is a career bureaucrat, and which takes place in the infamously “sick” title building, a building based, incidentally, on a real state office building here in Albany. The story is a wonderful, laugh-out-loud-funny parody of bureaucracy, but unfortunately I’m the only one it seems to make laugh out loud. It remains, as of this date, unpublished, though full of hope.
2) What have you been reading/spending your time with most lately?
My full-time job, which, as the term “full-time” might imply, occupies at least part of my time. When I’m not there, or writing or sleeping, I’m often reading historical novels. I try to read what I’m writing. For the last decade or so, when I was writing short stories exclusively, I was reading nothing but short stories. I seldom read collections (Alice Munro and George Saunders being the glorious exceptions); on the theory that if you want to write your best you should read the best, I read the prize anthologies for the most part – O. Henry, Pushcart and Best American Short Stories. As a matter of fact, I collect the latter as a hobby; I probably have 75% of all the volumes published since they were inaugurated in 1915, and I’m hoping they’ll rub off. With hard work and perseverance I hope to someday be included in Good American Short Stories, then work my way up to Better American Short Stories. I think Best is probably too much to hope for at my age.
3) You’ve just published your first collection of stories, Hart’s Grove. What did you find to be the most exciting part of the process?
Without question, the most exciting part is the launching of the book after all the hum-drum hard work and tedium is done. Any writer who says otherwise is either lying or a fool. Of course, I suppose he or she could be both, a lying fool. Or a foolish liar. At any rate, after years of laboring in rejection and obscurity, never sure if your little collection of letters and syllables will ever see the light of day, the bright sunshine of the limelight is pretty irresistible, not to mention metaphorically mixed. I could get used to champagne, adoration, and applause if I weren’t so humble.
4) What are you working on now?
I’m writing a historical novel right now. The protagonist is a young doctor in the year 1857 in, of all places, Hart’s Grove, Pennsylvania. It’s based on one of my Hart’s Grove stories (which is not included in the collection) and I’ve written over 200 pages. Some wonderful writing there, if I do say so myself, chock full of terrific characters, snappy dialog, beautiful settings. But, it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m probably going to need a plot as well, so it could be a while yet.
Andrea Waterfield is a summer intern with The Missouri Review.
An Interview with Julia Wendell
Julia Wendell’s work has appeared in TMR vol. 8.2, 12.2, and 19.1. Her new collection The Sorry Flowers was published in November 2009 by WordTech Communications.
Q: The Missouri Review first published your poem Fireside” in 1985. What is the biggest change in your interests as a writer since that time?
A: There have been a lot of joys and disappointments since then, and lots and lots of change. Since I’m a writer who writes from my own experiences, what is happening in my life affects my poems in a singular way. Back in 1985, I was rather freshly out of Iowa, still a publisher and teacher. At 54, I’m an equestrian athlete (specifically a three-day event rider) and am about as far away from the academy as possible. Somehow that seems to suit me. I draw life and energy and purpose from my horses, in much the same way that I do from my poems. Three-day eventing is as much about determination and bravery as poetry is about self-doubt and questioning, and somehow these oxymoronic elements in my life feed each other.
Q: What poets do you read frequently or particularly admire?
A: In a pinch, I’d say, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Mark Strand, Wordsworth, Keats, T.S. Eliot, and Milton are my favorite poets. They’re the ones whose poems I can read a thousand times and still find something illuminating and delightful on the 1001.
Q: In the last poem of your new collection, you wrote, “I want to fly on my new wings / I want to leave the barn and its longings.” Does that sentiment apply to you as a poet?
A: In much of The Sorry Flowers, the poet is hemmed in by sickness, depression, loss of her parents, conflicts in family life and life in general. There’s almost a claustrophobic feel as she confronts these issues, but I like to think that the poems open up a bit at the book’s end, offering resolutions and [an] escape from the self-consuming earlier poems. Life is change, and if we can change with it, then we can escape our boundaries and limitations as poets and as people and even identify with the natural world, [becoming] the young bird in the rafters.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: After finishing a memoir about my life as a three-day event rider called Finding my Distance, I’ve gone back to writing some poems and am enjoying a new narrative element that is infiltrating them, probably because I’ve spent the last five years writing all the way to the edge of the page. I would love to write more prose in the near future, and am waiting for the right spark.
An Interview with Todd James Pierce
In the second of our summer interview series, TMR intern Lisa Hartman got in touch with the novelist and short story writer Todd James Pierce. He is the author of the novel A Woman of Stone and the short-story collection Newsworld, which won the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. His recent work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Georgia Review, Indiana Review, North American Review and Shenandoah. He lives in the northern part of Santa Barbara County, California, in a little town where the movie Sideways was filmed. Bonus Hunter: Confessions of an Online Gambler appeared in (TMR 31.3 Fall 2008).
Currently, Pierce is working on his non-fiction book, The Artifical Matterhorn and was glad to give us the inside look into his upcoming work.
INTERVIEWER: How long have you been working on your unpublished non-fiction book, “The Artificial Matterhorn?” What kind of research actually went into creating this project?
PIERCE: I’ve been working on it now for five years. Well, five years and a bit. In terms of research, I’ve completed a tremendous amount of research for the book. I spent a good deal of 2005-2007 in the air, traveling to the locations where these parks once stood and talking to the people who designed and built them. I know that I’ve conducted over 150 interviews for the book, most in person. And actually, I think the number now is closer to 175. But there’s something incredibly cool about spending a day with a person who is 80 or 90 or (in two cases) 97 and talking about his or her life experiences. Some of the Disney people, sure, have been previously interviewed about their work in outdoor amusements. But aside from them, most of these people have never been interviewed. So, from this perspective, I find the work rewarding, as I feel that I’m preserving something that would not otherwise be preserved.
INTERVIEWER: Theme parks have shown up before in your fiction. What draws you to this topic?
PIERCE: Two answers:
(1) My grandmother, whom I was very close to, worked in theme park operations for most of her life, up until the time she was 80. She started at Knott’s Berry Farm (here, in California) and then later worked for Disney. Even after she retired, she used to attend the “alumni” meeting each month at the park.
(2) I’m interested in the idea of themed space and our cultural attachment to entertainment. (You can probably see that in my last book, Newsworld.) The concept of themed space, in its barest form, is to create an artificial environment, landscape and architecture that is divorced from its surrounding geography. The particular type of themed space that was developed in the 1950s were these parks that allowed visitors to spend time in cinematic environments. The early theme parks resemble movie sets–the western set, the jungle set, the space port, etc. And so, back in the 1950s, the allure of the theme park was obvious: visitors wanted to spend time inside of an environment that resembled a movie or a TV show. It’s really the start of interactivity, the point at which the audience is allowed to participate in the film. From there, cinematic themed space expanded into restaurants and shopping malls, eventually into planned communities. In most American cities now, there are many places that resemble, to some extent, the type of environment found on a movie set.
I’m a professor. And I think most of the people I work with are disturbed by the artificiality of theme parks. I’m fascinated by it.
But also, I’m not writing a cultural studies book. I’m writing a narrative history–the story of the men and women who designed and built these parks, their elaborate struggles, the lawsuits, the crimes, the ambition, the greed. You know, the story is about the people more than anything else.
INTERVIEWER: How does “The Artificial Matterhorn” differ from your previously published work?
PIERCE: Most everything I’ve published up until this point has been fiction. At least in terms of book. This story is nonfiction. I’m using the writing stance of a novelist to create narration and construct scenes. But I’ve spent years now, talking with dozens and dozens of individuals, visiting archives, reviewing oral histories, reading every book and magazine article on the subject, so that hopefully I get the details right.
Look for Pierce’s The Artificial Matterhorn coming soon!
Lisa Hartman is a summer intern at The Missouri Review
Call for Interviews
TMR needs good, fresh author interviews for Volume 31 (2008). Recent past issues include engaging conversations with such writers and poets as Sven Birkerts, Jeffrey Eugenides, Terrance Hayes, A.M. Homes, Jonathan Lethem. Interviewers interested in publishing their work in TMR or in querying about interview subjects should contact us at question@missourireview.com.