A Snark of a Book, and its Author

by

Lisa Guidarini

 

LI’d never heard of Roy Kesey when his recent book of short stories, All Over: Stories, arrived on my desk. The publicist for the recently created independent press, Dzanc Books, knew me from the days I’d worked with her at her former position, at Coffee House Press in Minneapolis. She had an idea what sorts of books I liked, and the fact I didn’t like to mess around with books that weren’t extremely well written. She also knew I liked things that were on the cutting edge, books with a little snark to them, written with inventive, ironic prose. I knew she wouldn’t steer me wrong.

All Over is an impressive collection, if a little loopy at times. Occasionally it had me scratching my head, but I can’t say I’ve ever read anything quite like it before. Perhaps Dzanc describes it best:

Roy Kesey connects his characters’ lives through pain and fantasy while juggling vaguely exotic locales and crackling dialogue. The characters are each in their own way “everyman” . . . and Kesey’s empathy for their human weakness is evident as strange circumstances give way to moments of true emotion . . . [He is] a writer who continues to use language to undress the human condition.

Immediately after finishing the first couple of stories I emailed Lauren at Dzanc, telling her I just had to interview this author. His was such an original, refreshing voice, and I had to know more about what made him tick.

Who are your biggest literary influences? What writers have had the most impact on your own writing?
Ah yes, the tricky business of where stuff comes from. I wrote my first story—not good, just first—my senior year of college, and started making a habit of it over the next few years. At that point I happened to be in France, and I was reading a lot of Gide and discovering Giono, Le Clézio, Cendrars, Marguerite Duras. Most of my stories from those years were unreadable—I blame Duras and that overwhelming voice of hers. I was also reading a lot of Borges and Calvino, and looking back, I think they probably had the biggest influence it terms of what I later became interested in exploring.

Other big discoveries come scattered over the next ten years or so. Donald Barthelme, Nathanael West. Pynchon and Bulgakov, Woolf and Beckett. And once I started reading in Spanish, I came to Cortázar and Vargas Llosa, Borges all over again, García Márquez, Ribeyro and Bolaño. Of all those, Cortázar was probably the biggest in terms of showing me tricks I wanted to try.

Were you a big reader as a child? What are your defining early memories of reading?
Yeah,  pretty huge—flashlight under the covers, weekly bicycle trips to the library—especially after our television “broke” when I was seven or so, and my dad took it to the shop to get it fixed, which must have been a pretty complicated process, since we didn’t get it back until I was ten. And on certain levels, this leads to a better answer to your first question.

The two books that really started things off were Marjorie Flack’s Angus Lost, and Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. I read both of those books to my kids now, and those slate blues and saturated blacks in Angus Lost still send shivers down my back.

Most of the stuff I read was pretty typical, I think. I had two beautifully illustrated hardbacks from the forties that had been my father’s, both the size of cinderblocks, one of Robin Hood and one of King Arthur, and I’ll bet I read them both thirty or forty times. Roald Dahl, Lewis and Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, Thomas Costain. Robert Ruark’s The Old Man and the Boy, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling, a terrific adventure book called Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger. Then there was my island phase, with Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, and my rodent phase with Watership Down and Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. And there was a book called Lee Baird, Son of Danger by H.C. Thomas which, its cheesy title notwithstanding, contained the first moment of psychological insight that I remember sitting up and wanting to remember.

So, yeah, I wore out a couple of library cards. And while I’m not sure how much effect those books had on my writing at the sentence level, they are without a doubt what got me writing twenty years later. They cultivated a love of that terrific forward push, of the sense that something huge is about to happen. That level of concern with plot is not always my top priority at any given point on any given project, but I hope it’s never too far from the top of my mind, since it is surely one of the biggest sources of pleasure for many readers.
 
How structured are you as to your writing schedule? What’s the structure of a typical writing session for you?
Pretty dang structured these days, now that I think about it. I get home from dropping my kids off at school around nine in the morning, and I have until it’s time to pick them up to work unfettered. That makes six straight hours of work three days a week, and four hours the other two, which is, most days, about as much as my brain can take working full bore.

On a good day I’ll head straight into the work, usually tinkering with whatever I worked on the previous day for an hour or so to make sure I’m back in touch with the voicing, and then into the new section or chapter. On a bad day I’ll spend the entire time glaring at outlines, and muttering to myself about failing arcs, and staring out the window, and making more coffee, and checking my email.

But when a given day’s given time is done, the pen drops to the desk; afternoons are for playing with my kids, evenings for reading and watching movies and hanging out with my wife. If I’m working on a particularly knotty moment in a given piece, I may sneak back to the computer after she goes to bed, but when that happens I usually end up working until three or four, and then being impatient and fuzzy the following day.

To date you’ve published a novella and a collection of short stories. What is it about shorter forms you find conducive to your style?
Well, it’s true that everything I’ve written started out short, but it’s also true that some of the pieces that ended up short used to be longer. Nothing in the World was at one point a full novel, for example.

Regardless, yes, I do work quite a bit in shorter forms. To some degree I think that’s a function of my interest in voicing and diction. I think that many, many voices—the ones I’ve come up with, anyway—can work well in shorter pieces, but the farther they are from ‘real-world’ diction, the more draining they are over the long haul. Somewhere around fifty pages out they often start to cloy, which is when I know I’ve overwritten the character in question.

I’m a little bit leery of the usual paeans to compactness and focus and in-and-outness, not because they’re untrue or outside of my experience, but because I get a little nervous whenever I find myself agreeing with the majority about anything, and, more to the point, because I think that whatever can be said to the credit of short stories in these regards can also be said about set pieces in novellas or novels, or epic poems for that matter. That said, I think there’s a strong case to be made for the virtue of limits of whatever type, and for the good things that can happen when we are forced to confront them. This may not be the world’s cleanest analogy, but many of my favorite poems are villanelles and sonnets, where you can feel the tension of the author striving to work wild within strict formal parameters.

Your style has been called “humorous,” “empathetic,” and even referred to as “a train wreck.” What do you think this says about you, as a writer?
Humorous, train wreck. Are you sure they weren’t talking about my junior prom?

I’m very pleased to hear any of those words applied to any of my stories. I think humor is hard to pull off under the best of circumstances, but it’s something I shoot for a lot, and when it works, nothing could make me happier. When I first decided to get organized and dig into fiction hard, I was writing a lot of stories that were meant to be funny, but were in fact lost somewhere between clever and smart-ass, which is terrible country to be lost in, or found. And I remember thinking, if this is what I do best, and this is the best I can do, maybe I ought to shop around for another calling.

It was right about then that I ran into the work of Tony Earley and Lorrie Moore, and, slightly later, George Saunders and Nicola Mason. The timing was perfect: I needed somebody to show me that it was possible to be funny-odd-and-ha-ha, that stories could be tonally high-spirited and formally ludic even in the midst of events and realizations that aren’t at all. Seeing that in the work of these four writers was hugely liberating for me, and all that remained was for me to figure out how to write stories that didn’t suck.

Empathy is a big one too, of course. With some characters it’s easy, even too easy sometimes, when those characters are, say, too much like me, and my tendency is thus to cut them maybe a little too much slack. It’s harder when the characters are actively dislikable, but without an empathetic understanding of the dynamics behind those characters’ actions, the characters are nothing but cut-outs, the story nothing but a wasted tree.

As for the train wrecks, I’m hoping that was in reference to certain of my stories that are all about the forward push, the rising energy that seems, on the page, to be going out of control. That’s a mode I enjoy working in sometimes, as long as the mess at the end, however big, is, you know, a pretty mess; as long as one of the train carriages bursts open to show something marvelous.

What contemporary writers impress you most?
Aside from the few I’ve already mentioned, I love seeing what people like Padgett Powell and Madison Smartt Bell and Denis Johnson manage with voice. Steven Millhauser wipes me out on a regular basis. Marilynne Robinson quiets me in all the best ways.

What’s next for you? What are you working on now?
A novel, wouldn’t you know. It’s set in northern Peru in the late nineties, and works with different forms of history (personal, cultural, national, fictional), and different forms of memory, how they support and betray us, how we use and are used by them. Also, lizards. And love. And trees. And death. The usual!

What books have you been reading lately? Any you’d recommend?
It’s mostly history and historiography that I need in my brain for the novel. My main character is half a thesis short of a Ph.D. in history, so I need to know everything he knows. Right this minute I’m working through Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream, which deals with what we talk about when we talk about objectivity, among other things. I’m very much enjoying it, and wearing out any number of pencils in the margins. I’ve also been working through (or back through, in a few cases) a couple of Carlo Ginzburg’s books—The Cheese and the Worms; Clues, Myths and the Historical Method; History, Rhetoric and Proof—and while some of those titles may sound a bit dry, the books are marvelous, fast and smart and wise.


Lisa Guidarini subsists, almost entirely, on her twin passions of reading and writing (running just ahead of her love for Goose Island beer and Asiago cheese). Her day job, unsurprisingly, is at a public library where she works as Adult Program Coordinator for the Algonquin Area Public Library District. (To this day, she still wonders that people really pay her for the privilege of working in a library.) By evening, she is a graduate student in a distance learning program through the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s School of Library and Information Studies. In her spare time she tends to her family, including one husband, three children, and two rambunctious Jack Russell terriers. She also enjoys digital photography, visiting old cemeteries, and the occasional old-fashioned road trip. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she also blogs about anything literary or otherwise interesting. You can reach Lisa at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it