Press Release for Rear View published by Houghton Mifflin Company

Q) Small New England towns are the regularly featured settings in your stories. How much of the place and the people we find there are from your actual experiences?

A) I grew up in Southeastern Massachusetts, in the New Bedford area, across the river in a town called Fairhaven, so that's where some of the stories get their post-industrial mill town gloominess. Some of that gloominess might be as much cultural as geographical. In "Something Like Shame" and "Pious Objects," for example, I was trying to get at a kind of infinitely private sadness that I think might be unique to the worldview of the French Canadian community that assembled in the area in the late 19th to mid-20th century. I'm a product of that community. Though I'm removed from it by just a generation, in my memory, my paternal grandmother, whom I knew, and my other grandparents, whom I know only from photos and stories, are like these tribal elders from a lost civilization. Even my father, who died in 1992, seems to have been born in some other world. There was a pessimism — or maybe a realism — that grows out of the particular flavor of Catholicism that the immigrants brought down from Canada with them. A defeatism. It's hard to put in words. It's like you get to the end of the weekend and you're thinking, deep down, is this all there is? I think it's there in a lot of my stories. I think I get close to describing it in the stories I mentioned: "something as disappointing and simple as rain, a secret you kept with the shiny streets." It's all tied up in my mind with the dark brown woodwork trim in those old tenement apartments. Rosary beads. The smell of cigarette smoke. The hats I remember my grandmother wearing.

That area — Fairhaven and New Bedford — is important to me, especially now that I no longer live there. The story "Bakery" is set in an actual bakery where I worked one summer a long time ago. The building is still there, but it's not a bakery anymore. While there was no violence or any bad people as far as I could tell, I did witness a lot of tension. The possibility of violence or injury never seemed far off. And the monotony of the work — wow. Now that's work. One time a supervisor took me in a rickety elevator with no walls up to the third floor and left me there for what seemed like days. My job was to make croutons from stale hot dog rolls. There was no way down — that's how I remember it. The elevator was at the bottom of the shaft. All around me were these 19th-century brick walls with huge windows looking out over the city of New Bedford. Crouton dust. The suffocating heat. And the sound of the bread grinder.

Almost all of the stories in the collection are based at least in part on actual experience or on an anecdote from my youth or sometimes even a chance bit of conversation. I may not look like it, but I'm always listening. For instance, with "Impala," I think that story arose from just a scrap I overheard one time. Someone was talking about a couple that hadn't had kids yet. "What are they, roommates?" And the tone in the person's voice conveyed so much about the expectations people place on marriage and the way you should live and where you should be at a certain point in your life. It was the taunt and the implicit moral judgment of the comment that got me going, that opened an entrance into the narrative. In the story it's Maysle's father who is overheard saying these words.

Q) One of the many charms of your stories is your ability to capture those unexpected, sometimes life-altering moments in a person's otherwise mundane life.

A) Right, the epiphanic moment. That's a pretty standard artifice of the short story. In truth, I think I'm skeptical of such moments, which maybe comes out in a story like "Wheatback." I mean, really, what's up with the penny? I can't really say — other than that the detail just fits. It feels right to the story. If the penny is like some magical presence, or a token of metonymic transference, its power only lasts as long as Paul — or the reader — doesn't know what it is, that is, until he opens his hand. Then there's that deflation again. It's only a penny. Or maybe it's meaning is just deferred — if Paul could only figure it out. But we don't know if he does because the story ends right there.

Q) Do you have those "aha!" moments when you see the pieces of a story coming together?

A) Absolutely. I think the search for that moment — or that detail or whatever it is that makes the story stick — is probably the best thing about writing. It's the fun part, but when it's not happening, it's not a lot of fun, a condition which I'm doubly susceptible to because I have no set writing regime. Just a bunch of bad habits. I'm so easily distracted.

But, yes, I would have to say that there was an "aha" moment for me in almost every story I've written. It's what keeps me coming back — that moment when I realize that the story is going to work. Yes, it's a keeper. But it doesn't always coincide with what I intend the significant moment to be for the reader, and it's hard to know what that significant moment or detail will be until I'm deep into the writing. I work glacially slow most of the time, so I need whatever help I can give myself.

Q) While your characters turn away from the Catholic Church for perhaps less dramatic reasons than the ones making headlines today, disillusionment with organized religion and with the Catholic Church specifically surface again and again in your stories. How does faith inform your characters' lives?

A) I really don't feel I know anything about the subject of Catholicism beyond what living with such a worldview feels like. Maybe I shouldn't even be talking about it except to say that Catholicism is about the problem of suffering. So putting Catholicism into a story gives you ready-made tension and conflict because it acknowledges a lack. It acknowledges a problem. But it also makes things sort of difficult because readers bring so many ideas and strong feelings about religion with them.

The best Catholic story I've ever read is "A Father's Story" by Andre Dubus. It's one of the best stories I've ever read, period. The ending is like a minor miracle. In addition to my not being worthy to have untied Dubus's sandal, I don't think my stories are really comparable because they don't add to any understanding of Catholicism or Catholic experience per se. Dubus's story is like a beautiful response to some of the less than generous manifestations of Catholicism. It takes the Church at its word. He uses this morally dubious act by the narrator, Luke Ripley, as an opportunity for some kind of closer dialogue with God. It's a beautifully nuanced understanding of what a relationship with God is.

In all the stories in my collection except "Midnight Mass" and "Pious Objects," Catholicism is more of a backdrop. Speaking of "Midnight Mass," that story really disturbs me whenever I read it. I have to admit that I was dreading the day when my mother read it. I gave her a review copy of the collection the last time I was in Massachusetts and she took it to bed. She's a devout Catholic. She observes daily Mass and participates in the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament when she can. The next morning I could tell she was really bothered by "Midnight Mass." I can understand why. It's kind of rough. My response surprised me: "Wait till you see what happens to the main character." Gilbert reappears twenty years later as Red in "Bakery." So in some sense, maybe I'm more Catholic than I let on. There's a hint of an implicit moral order — even though Gilbert in "Midnight Mass" is probably guiltier of a lack of imagination than deliberate cruelty. Still, as Red, he reaps a bitter harvest at the end of "Bakery." He's alone and literally in the dark. He's suffering.

Originally I had "Midnight Mass" and "Bakery" out of chronological order. So it was hard to intuit that Red is an older incarnation of Gilbert. Brandy Vickers, who is a great and wise editor, suggested not only that the two stories be arranged chronologically, but that I pull a chapter from "Bakery," treat it as its own separate story, and place it after "Midnight Mass." In that chapter we see Red trying to make contact with a new neighbor. He's trying to make some kind of simple human contact. He's vulnerable. The idea was to elicit a greater degree of sympathy in the reader for Red, who's not all that likeable. I bring this up because in some ways the story works much better if we can more fully recognize Red as a human being. Not only is his suffering, I think, more palpable, but we are to a larger degree more complicit with his inexcusable treatment of Prak. And I guess that's a part of what I'm aiming at in the story: you can't dismiss Red's acts as the acts of some alien force. That's kind of central to Catholicism: you can't hold yourself aloof. We're all sinners because we're all human.

Q) Why do the characters often look elsewhere for fulfillment? Do they return to religion sometimes?

A) I think they look elsewhere — or just give up looking — because they feel Catholicism fails them as a way to explain the world they're living in. But I can't leave it at that. I'm conflicted. It's always going to be there for me. I don't judge the characters, but some part of me wants to add that maybe it is they who fail Catholicism, and not the other way around. It's not a closed issue with me. Maybe the characters come back because the writer keeps coming back.

Q) You've struck a very nice balance in this collection. While there's certainly a masculine edge to your stories — men settling disagreements with fighting and bullying and violence like in "Bakery," in "Impala," you capture quite poignantly and realistically the relationships between men and women — story lines that might appeal more to women.

A) I would love nothing more than to be read as a writer who appeals to women readers. I say this because women, if I'm not mistaken, read more than men. They're a bigger market for fiction. So that's fine with me. My first reader is my wife, Kim Bridgford, who's a poet. Everything I write goes through her first. She's my failsafe against writing something completely idiotic. I trust what she says. A lot of material dies a quick death right there.

What I hope comes out in the stories is that the macho posing of some of the characters is absurd. Whenever I've witnessed behavior like that, I can't help but imagine that it's kind of unreal. It's scripted. Like this ultra-patriotism we're witnessing lately. It's a role to assume in order to avoid dealing with a situation more fully as a human being. I think this is what I intended in "Scissors." There's a moment when all the bullshit falls away, all the strutting and tough talk and we're left with something, I hope, more real. It's just a peek, though. It's as rare as the eclipse.

Q) For how long have you been writing the stories in Rear View?

A) These stories were written — and rewritten — over a fairly long period of time. I often leave a piece and then come back to it years later. "Cellular" was like that on the first go-around. I lost interest in it after a couple of pages and it took its place among the scores of unfinished stories I've left lying around in various stages. I never throw anything out, just in case. Years later I happened upon "Cellular" again, and it seemed to come together with less effort. Tex appeared. Suddenly, I could see the narrative arc, the logic of the story. That he's a talking whippet made a lot of sense to me. Frank, the main character, is sort of married to the dog. They bicker. No big deal. In a story with so many broken forms of communication, it's a natural. I finished the narrative fairly quickly from there, but that was maybe three years after I started writing it, with that long hiatus in the middle.

Overall, I usually take quite a while to get a story to where it's finished. And even then, say, for example, with "Pious Objects," sometimes I feel the need to go back and revise it. That story had a particular shape in its first version in the collection, but it needed something. It was kind of soulless. Brandy Vickers pointed this out, but in a really great way. So one morning last fall I just sat down with it and immediately fell into a swoon. I was literally buzzing. My face was actually hot. I was drunk with intensity. I came up for air when my wife and son got home in the middle of the afternoon. It was like some kind of religious experience. I had this afterglow for days.

Q) How has your writing evolved?

A) I think I've loosened up a little. There was a time when every sentence had to shine. Like that passage in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" about the trees being "full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled." I still see that as a worthy goal — shiny prose. But now I think I give the sentences a little breathing room. Even if I could get them all to shine, that's probably kind of hard on a reader. I can understand a reader going, yeah, OK, the sentence shines. Please move on with the story.

As far as narrative material goes, I would probably never have written something like "Cellular" ten years ago. Too fanciful. A talking dog? Now, I don't see a problem with this. The realistic is too constraining. Or the guy in the whale in "Fun with Mammals"? Could he really survive that long inside the whale, etc.? It just seemed right at that moment in a story that's pretty whacked out to begin with. They pull a guy out. I'm a little less serious in the fiction. Literalism is dull.

Q) Are there any authors in particular to whom you've looked for inspiration?

A) Andre Dubus, Alice Munro, William Trevor. Individual stories by these and others that live on, that I go back to, that have become part of my chemistry. "A Father's Story" by Dubus, as I've mentioned. Trevor's "Lost Ground." Robert Stone's "Under the Pitons." I remember reading that story late one night and realizing how it had this physical impact on me. My heart beating, chills. Nicholson Baker, though it always raises an eyebrow when he's mentioned. Still, he's an amazing writer. Cormac McCarthy — he's like some distant force of nature, like a hurricane causing riptides from hundreds of miles away. Suttree and Blood Meridian. I know he's not everyone's cup of tea. Joyce Carol Oates. That collection Heat is really good. Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson blew me away — again, one of those moments when you know the brain chemistry, so to speak, is being altered as you read. Russell Banks. Allan Gurganus's short story about the dead Civil War soldier writing a letter to his mother from the land of the dead. It's a two-part story; the first part is an actual letter from Whitman to a soldier's mother informing her of the son's death in the hospital where Whitman was volunteering as a nurse. The second part is the son writing to his mother, but then it turns out to be his mother's own waking dream of what the boy would say to her. "Reassurance." That's a masterful piece of writing. The tenderness is humbling. That story schooled me.

Q) What are you working on now?

A) I received a grant from the state to research a novel about four guys who start a game of bocce ball at a family cookout in western Illinois and end up playing across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. So last August I drove from Coal Valley, Illinois, to Salt Lake City in a rental car. Just to soak in the particulars of the landscape. I've always been fascinated with the Midwest — that's where my wife's from — and the Great Plains. There's a feeling you get out there that's part sadness and part exhilaration. An emptiness. I brought a blue bocce ball and a pallino that I borrowed from my brother-in-law, so I could test game conditions on a variety of surfaces. The Sand Hills of Nebraska, the Badlands, the swampy lowlands near the Mississippi River, the Salt Flats in Utah. It was good for me. I work at home as a web applications developer, and, seriously, I can go for days without leaving the house. So just pulling the car over to the shoulder and getting out in the Sand Hills was akin to a transforming experience for me. There's a smell that's like pressing a baseball glove to your face. Organic and desiccated. The scale is all out of whack. It's not a human scale. My eyes didn't know how to process the information. You look around and it's like you're indoors. Everything's in sharp focus for miles.