The Believer Deluxe Retro ClassyPak includes: the 2004 Visual Issue (Mike Mills, Guy Maddin, Raymond Pettibon, a DVD); the 2006 Music Issue (Calexico, the National, Paul Collins, Rick Moody, a CD); and the 2006 Visual Issue (Matthew Barney, Shelley Jackson, a removable stack of paintings by Kehinde Wiley affixed to the cover). All this for - - - - |
- - - - Copyright 2004 - Bandoppler Publishing
- - - - STEPHEN ELLIOTT
Stephen Elliott is the author of Jones Inn, A Life Without Consequences, and What It Means to Love You. He also recently edited Politically Inspired: Fiction For Our Time. Elliott also teaches creative writing at Stanford University and his fourth novel, Happy Baby, will be co-published by McSweeney's and MacAdam/Cage in February of 2004. I began questioning Mr. Elliott about these things via e-mail on October 25th and our back and forth patter continued for a week. What follows is our conversation, in full. - - - - BE: In preparation for this interview, I dug through your website (www.stephenelliott.com) and found myself drawn to the "Emails from the Nadar Campaign," series. As a fellow Nadar supporter, I tried to return to that phase of my life and it amazed me how enticing you made the campaign trail seem, but also realized that 2000 seems very difficult to recall, as if it was an eternity ago. I realize this is a personal revelation and I'm twenty-four and therefore, I'm in a time in which my life is constantly evolving, but do you feel that most individuals share this feeling? That events such as September 11th and The Patriot Act and our recent invasions on Iraq and Afghanistan have stolen from us? SE: Yes and no. I mean September 11th changed everything, no doubt about that. But Bush winning (is that the right word?) changed quite a bit too. It would have been impossible for a third progressive candidate to win in 2004 with or without September 11th. That said, the rules change every four years, but September 11th is here to stay. But the larger question is: should people feel political? You and I were on the margins supporting Nadar, which is fine. But the most disturbing response I received to the Politically Inspired anthology was that it was no longer relevant because it came out too far after September 11th. That's my generation speaking, the non-voting generation. If September 11th and The Patriot Act changed that part of my generation's character then there would still be a benefit. I don't think it has yet. BE: I agree that a third party candidate doesn't have a chance in this coming election, but my logic is flawed by the fact that I don't necessarily want to elect a new candidate nearly as much as I want to eliminate an old threat. Obviously, that means that I should support the strongest contender and luckily, I'd have confidence with either Wesley Clark or Howard Dean in office. But at the same time, I feel that spending the last three years living under a President who has done absolutely nothing he has promised, continuously lied to his nation, stripped our personal freedoms and absolutely destroyed the budget reform Bush Sr. and Clinton had started should be a sign that things need to change in drastic ways. But then again, according to USA Today, Bush has a 50% success rating, so what do I know? SE: Well, radical change or not, Wesley Clark and Howard Dean seem to be your only options right now. We can all hope that we don't end up with a stuffed suit like Kerry or Gephardt. And we can vote. BE: You also mentioned that the biggest complaint is that your collection is no longer relevant, which caught me off guard. I once let Neal Pollack, whom I greatly admire as a writer, read a story I wrote about a struggling musician's search for the meaning of life. It took place on the eve of his college graduation. To date, I feel that piece best expresses who I am and what I want to express as a writer, but his main critique was that it lacked perspective. I think the same statement could be made of this collection because these issues are still so fresh in our minds as opposed to say, Pearl Harbor or JFK's assassination. I see where he was coming from, but at the same time, I don't agree. When you look back on something, isn't a great deal of the authority and passion and detail stripped away? I feel the exact passion that your collection should and has conveyed would be lost by someone who would look back on this with hindsight. SE: Right. The guy who made that comment is more than an idiot, he's symbolic of something fundamentally wrong with our generation. We have to be political. We have to think politically and do political things. Baseball is not more important than Iraq. We need to vote. The Politically Inspired anthology is relevant and will always be relevant. The trouble is that our low-attention span, me-me-me culture won't always recognize that. We need to get out of our head more and look around us. BE: Something I was very impressed by was the brilliant use of imagination by most of your contributors. I read a review that said the pieces that lacked the most usually involved a bad marriage and I tend to agree. Those pieces were good, but straightforward, and therefore lacked the creativity of fantasy or the subtlety of metaphor, which is what seemed to be the formulas for your strongest pieces. It allowed for freedom and subtlety and also made it easier to catch the reader by surprise. Out of the realistic fiction, I really enjoyed F.S. Yu's piece, "The Shield," but the climax of both Ben Greenman's story (a first person story involving 9/11 and Superman villain Mr. Mxyzptlk) and Doug Dorst's (an intelligent play on the old 'if a tree falls in the woods' adage) both caught me off guard in brilliant ways. I think this displacement of reality may be just a key component? SE: Sweet. I'm glad you liked FS Yu's story, because that is my pseudonym. I had commissioned a piece by a real human shield and when it didn't work out I just made one up and put a fake name on it. Yeah, Dorst's and Greenman's pieces are both standouts. But what I've found over and over again is that everybody likes different stories. The same stories that are praised the most in one review are knocked in different reviews. There is absolutely no agreement on the best stories of this collection. The great thing about editing an anthology, though, is that I picked the stories that I loved. I can look someone in the eye and say this is a great book. And I believe that. I mean, the student editors and I rejected like a hundred manuscripts. In my opinion there's not a single bad story in the book. It wouldn't be in there if I thought it was. But the truly amazing thing is that you have some pretty major writers in this collection, Charles Baxter, Anthony Swofford, Anne Ursu, Paul LaFarge, etc. And some of them wrote their very best stories for this book. It's as if the political element took their fiction to another level. Young writers could learn something from that. BE: Speaking of young writers, you've brought up something I'd like you to elaborate on, and that is role of these student editors. At almost any major university you have graduate students helping to edit literary journals and I've done this for McSweeney's for over a year now and I love it. But while this uses the same type of formula, it is a different creature entirely. I mean this was Stephen Elliott's project, not Stanford University's. I assume Stanford backed it, so was the work a class environment or simply volunteer based? SE: The students were undergrads, not grad. It wasn't sponsored in any way by the university. It was strictly volunteer, since I was also a volunteer. By that I mean I was not paid or compensated in any way for doing this collection. All of the royalties go to Oxfam. So since I wasn't being paid, I didn't feel bad exploiting the students. But they had a good experience, I think. Mostly their role was to read the stories I was pretty sure I was going to reject anyway and then write a summary on why I was right to reject the story. In one particular case, Nick Taylor, they convinced me to read and publish a story by a first time writer. All of the students volunteered on their own when, after hosting a political reading at Stanford, I just decided to ask if there were any students in the room that wanted to get involved in a political anthology. I was just coming to the idea at the time. BE: Before we move on, a couple of contributors I am curious about -- Dave Rees and Mark Lee. As far as Rees goes, I've been a huge fan of Get Your War On for quite a while. I met him recently at the 215 Festival in Philly and he is tentatively slated to be one of the next individuals I interview because frankly, he impressed the shit out of me. I'm going to guess that he was solicited to be a contributor and I'm curious why you took a risk on debuting his first work of fiction, rather than simply publishing his comics, which have been so successful? And wasn't Lee, who wrote Memo to Our Journalists, a fictional memo to the reporters embedded in Op Iraqi Freedom that is very intelligent and hilarious, actually embedded himself? SE: I believe Lee was actually embedded himself, but I didn't ask, to be honest. I just liked his piece. I did solicit Rees because I love Get Your War On so much. I mean, talk about pushing the boundaries of art. And Rees wrote back that he wanted to try writing fiction and if it didn't work out and I didn't want to publish it he would understand. I didn't guarantee anybody publication and I rejected some pretty famous people who I won't name. At any rate, Rees' turned in this brilliant story. Of course I was going to publish it. I'm sure the New Yorker would have published it given a chance. It's amazing. BE: The collection also featured a piece by a professional dominatrix, which is probably one of the most profoundly amusing. How did you come across a person in such a position with such an intelligently sadistic flair for politics? SE: Well, Morgana is actually an old friend of mine. She's very political, so I knew that already. She's also incredibly smart and well-educated, she had a 4.0 average at one of the best universities in the country. I thought it would be neat if she wrote a piece. Anyway, it turned out great, as you've seen. She's the only non-writer in the book. BE: Also, there are rumors of a second Politically Inspired collection. Can you elaborate a little on this and also, how does someone go about submitting if it isn't too late? SE: That's right, there is going to be a second anthology. It'll be probably a little over fifty percent invite, maybe 15 stories, and the rest from the slush pile. But they'll be specific things we're looking for in the ten stories from the slush pile and we won't know what those things are for another month. I don't think I'm ready to open the gates just yet. I'm choosing the student editors on November 5th when the student editors from the first collection will read in the Stanford Bookstore. Then we'll put the mechanisms in place for accepting submissions. When we are ready for stories what we'll be most interested in seeing will be set outside of America from a non-American perspective. Authors already selected for the second Politically Inspired include Susie Bright, Aimee Bender, Katharine Weber, Sam Lipstyte, and three authors from the first collection: Anthony Swofford, Anne Ursu, and Alicia Erian. BE: Shifting gears, your next novel, The Night Face Up, will be released in February by both McSweeney's and MacAdam/Cage. Obviously, you have had a long running relationship with McSweeney's, from your appearances in the literary journal to your weekly poker report to the presence of such McSweeney's miscreants as Marcel Dzama, Keith Knight (thank you, by the way, I've admired Knight since I saw him at a McSweeney's vs. TMBG showcase, but lost his name), Ben Greenman and K. Kvashay-Boyle, but what prompted you to co-publish your novel in both the standard and independent form? SE: Well first, it's no longer called The Night Face Up, as that name was taken, though that's still the Amazon listing. The title of the novel is now, and has to stay, Happy Baby. Basically, I had a long-standing relationship with MacAdam/Cage. They published my last two novels, What It Means to Love You and A Life without Consequences. Eggers kind of hinted that he would like to publish my next novel when he published three of my stories in McSweeney's 11. Ultimately it was the opportunity to have Dave Eggers edit my new novel that was driving the co-publishing deal. The way it works is that McSweeney's edited and designed the book and MacAdam/Cage will be responsible for distribution. MacAdam/Cage is great, but you don't pass up the opportunity to have your novel edited by Dave Eggers. He's the best editor I have worked with. And yeah, I do have a great relationship with McSweeney's but I've actually been with MacAdam/Cage much longer. They published A Life without Consequences and What It Means to Love You off the slush pile, when I didn't know anybody. I'm very loyal to them. BE: I just finished reading the three sample chapters of Happy Baby. These three chapters read in a reverse chronological order, as will your novel. What prompted you to tell the story backwards? Was this a decision you consciously made while writing the novel, or something that seemed right in retrospect? SE: No, that's just how I wrote it. The first chapter I wrote was the second chapter, which is the first one published in McSweeney's 11. As soon as I wrote that I knew I was going to write a book, so I started writing it backwards, working back to where all the bad stuff happened. Then I tried to make it go forward, but it didn't work so well. BE: The central theme of these chapters seems to be a conflict between a yearning to escape the past while constantly being drawn to return to these same disruptive times, as if these events have not only shaped the main character's personality, but his very being. Despite his attempts to hide from not only these events, but also reality in general, it seems they dominate him in ways that control every decision he makes. This appears to be a very dark novel? SE: Yes, that's true. I'm expecting with MacAdam/Cage and McSweeney's help to sell a grand total of five copies of this novel. It's an incredibly dark novel. It's about a boy that is sexually abused by the same person that is protecting him while he is in the juvenile detention center and grows up associating abuse with affection. He seeks it out in his relationships and puts himself in very dangerous situations. Happy Baby is filled with non-consensual, graphic sex. It's not going to be everybody's cup of tea. Anybody that's looking for a feel-good book should stay away from this one. But people that are looking to get some insight into a person that craves abuse as well as insight into the sexual politics of the child-welfare system might find it interesting. BE: Well, I promise to be one of those five and from what I've read, would recommend the book to anyone. The detail and authority of the sample chapters were amazing and can more than hold my interest through the darkness. Thanks for your time. - - - -
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