Cows, Collards, and Heroin

The most immediately unusual thing about your stories is their
brevity. Why so short? When did you first realize you could
write—were allowed to write—such short, short stories?

Although I had read Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes in college, I
never thought of trying such short forms, as though this “classic” were
enclosed in an untouchable box. The only form I seriously considered
was the traditional short story. Then, at a time when I was stuck in my
writing, a few years later, I happened to read the stories—what
he calls poems—of Russell Edson. The volume of his that I read
contains short, mostly domestic tales in which not all the protagonists
are human. It also helped me that not all the pieces were
successful—I could see how to attempt something and not mind
failing. I set myself the exercise of writing two paragraph-long
stories each day. Although I’ve written many longer things since then,
including a novel, I still find the short form wonderfully flexible and
effective.

Many of your stories have to do with characters or narrators
watching themselves think. Kurt Vonnegut called this “the existential
hum” and once wrote about a friend who described the seductive power of
heroin: “For the first time in his life, he was not annoyed by the
existential hum.” So. (a) Any ideas about the existential hum in your
stories? (b) Any ideas about the existential hum in general? (c) Any
thoughts about heroin and/or addiction?

(a) I had a very talented student once who decided to give up
writing because she couldn’t stand that existential hum. I was sorry
for the loss, but I understood. I don’t actually suffer from it all the
time, only when I’m “open” to writing. Sometimes it figures in the
stories, but often, maybe increasingly, it doesn’t. In the latest
volume, for instance, there is the very long story “Helen and Vi,”
about two old ladies. And most recently, I have written a piece about
the cows across the road, and it is mostly pure observation of the
cows, with very little about me. (b) Not today. (c) Not now.

Lots of allusions to Buddhism and “enlightenment” in your
stories—what is your relationship to Buddhism and/or
“enlightenment”?

Oh, I have attempted over the years to study and even practice some
form of Buddhism, which seems to me one of the better choices of
beliefs or disciplines in the world. I like everything I know about it,
though I’m not in any way a deep scholar of it. As I do with other
books, I accumulate books about it and read a little in them. I
meditate sometimes. I think I should meditate more, because it has good
effects.

But I think that scolding oneself for not meditating enough would
not be in keeping with Buddhist thought. In fact, I find Buddhist
thought—what I know of it, anyway—intellectually
fascinating too.

What have you been doing/eating/seeing in the past few days? (To
play fair: I have mostly been in a damp newspaper office; tonight I’ve
made some rice and beans and collards, though my diet is usually less
virtuous.)

Rice and beans and collards would be one of my favorite kinds of
meals. I’m teaching, these days, and even though it’s only one class,
meeting once a week, with only seven students, I tend to orient my week
around that—noticing things in my reading and daily life that
would feed into our discussions in class. I’m reading for a book club I
belong to in the neighborhood, and for the class. There’s a wonderful
book I discovered last spring called Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte that methodically and exhaustively examines different
sentence structures, taking all its examples from published work of a
wonderful variety of writers. I’m making my way through that.

I’m also on the home stretch of my translation of Madame Bovary. I
will read it through one more time and hope I’m not too surprised by
the choices I made a year ago, when I started the second draft.

Are you near a window? What’s outside your window?

I’m near a window, but the windows here are set fairly high up in
the wall. So from where I sit, I see the top of a beech hedge, the tops
of some trees, the top of a hill, the upper part of an old white house,
and the roof of an old red barn (where the cows live).