Karl Iagnemma
Author
of
On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction talks with Robert
Birnbaum
Writer and robotics engineer Karl Iagnemma was born and grew up
in the Detroit, Michigan area and attended The University of Michigan
and MIT. His stories have appeared in Zoetrope, Tin House,
and The Paris Review, and he was included in the Best
American Short Stories 2001. His debut story collection, On
the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction, was recently published.
He works in the mechanical engineering department at MIT, lives
in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is, of course, working on a novel.
On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction contains eight
stories showing the lives of doctors, foresters, mathematicians,
theoreticians and others as they try to connect the certainty they
feel in their work with the rest of their lives: A doctor's wife
recalls his ground-breaking experiments on a gunshot victim; a phrenologist
is outwitted by a con-woman; a mathematician obsesses about a former
lover and the theorem that made her famous; a miner secretly attempts
to educate himself, causing his wife to be suspicious…
The Boston Globe's Gail Caldwell weighs in, "…it
is a welcome phenomenon in the past several years, with writers
such as Andrea
Barrett, Alan
Lightman, and newcomer Anthony Doerr embracing and showcasing
the natural world in their fiction. What Iagnemma brings to this
realm is his careful compassion for the human condition. He has
the technical savvy to know what to leave out, and the intuition
for a certain evocation of tone - his characters are sympathetic,
even when (or because) they are flawed, wrong-headed, selfish, or
self-pitying."
Robert Birnbaum: You grew up in Detroit?
Karl Iagnemma: A suburb of Detroit, yeah. Shelby
Township. You saw the movie 8 Mile? We're at 24 Mile. Slightly
greener pastures.
RB: If Eminem's movie hadn't come out, what would
be the reference point?
KI: I'm on the map. I have no complaints.
RB: You went to the University of Michigan.
KI: And studied engineering.
RB: Why did you do that? Because you’re
a first-generation American?
KI: My father is, and he is an engineer. And I
was more of a math/science type, and I liked it. I never really
considered anything else [chuckles]. That's the short answer. But
I was lucky that I ended up liking it. But the writing— I
didn't really write anything until college. I thought I might like
to write and the professor, Burt Hornbeck, he suggested that I show
him something that I had written. So I actually produced something.
I wrote a three-page story about me and some friends of mine stealing
beer from people's garages in the neighborhood. No dialogue, just
pure expository drive. And it was terrible, but he said, "This
is excellent." And so I kept writing.
RB: Why do you think it was terrible and he thought
it was excellent?
KI: It was terrible in the sense that most beginning
works are terrible. I think he thought it was excellent because
he saw some potential. So he's really the one that got me started.
Then I took a couple of classes at Michigan.
RB: Am I going to have to share billing with him
in the dedication to your novel?
KI: Well, I was going to do the initials, for
BH and RB. So no one will know anyway.
RB: [laughs] Right.
KI: I took a class with Alec Young. And then I
took a class my senior year with Charles Baxter. He was a pretty
big influence, in the sense that he seemed like what I would imagine
I would want to be. He's an excellent writer. I love his stories
and was also a very cool guy and a great teacher.
RB: This was as an undergraduate?
KI: Yeah.
RB: Baxter is a great writer and, of course, it's
arguable whether someone deserves more attention, but I've felt
since I first came across his writing that he would be more prominent
if he lived on the East Coast. But that's true for a number of writers.
KI: Who knows? My sense is that he is very well
respected in the literary community, but he doesn't have a glaring
profile that other writers have. He's as talented as anyone. His
stories are amazingly good.
RB: Have you read his essays?
I
have entertained thoughts of quitting research, but part of
me thinks that my writing might become—instead of better—might
become less interesting. I know for sure that I would probably
lose half my idea sources. |
KI: I read his essays about writing, Burning
Down the House, which I thought were very smart. And he had
imparted some of that wisdom in the class. I've taken three or four
classes since then— in terms of learning how to write, his
class is fantastic. You actually learn things, which before that
I thought was impossible. How can you teach someone how to write?
But he did a really good job of it.
RB: He has a new novel coming out this fall.
KI: About Saul and Patsy? Right?
RB: I don't know. I just noted it in the Pantheon
catalogue.
KI: They are characters from some of his stories.
His book A Relative Stranger is one of the best short-story
collections in the—well, Jesus — past X years. That
doesn't mean anything; I've only read twenty books in the past ten
years. It's one of the best short-story collections I've ever read.
There is a really charming story in that collection about these
two characters, Saul and Patsy, and I think his novel is going to
pick up on them.
RB: He was a positive influence or an inspiration?
KI: Both. And [also] Professor Burt Hornbeck.
[Then] I took a year off. After Michigan I went to Ireland for a
year, and I was enrolled in classes, but mostly just writing. So
that was my MFA, my low-budget MFA. And then I came back.
RB: You went to a writing program in Ireland?
KI: No, I was studying Math and English.
RB: I didn't think Ireland had many MFA programs.
KI: It was a cool thing. They don't. But they
had just started doing a thing that year where they had a workshop.
But being Irish it was incredibly disorganized.
RB: [laughs]
KI: We'd all get together and meet. The prof was
Tom Kilroy, who is a playwright and novelist, and we'd just sit
around and bullshit for a half an hour and then go to the bar, the
ideal workshop experience. I don't know how much I got out of it,
but it was fun. The first time I thought about getting into an organized
writing group there, I went and talked to a professor there, and
he said, "I'll tell you what to do. You go to the Dame Street
Bar every Monday at the beginning of the month and there will be
guys there talking about fiction and get a drink and join in."
And that was the more Irish version of the workshop, which is probably
equally effective.
RB: And then you came back to MIT?
KI: Yeah.
RB: You're working on a long-range project there?
KI: I was just starting graduate school then.
Having a year off to write convinced me that it was something that
I wanted to do and could tolerate. Spending a few hours a day doing
it. So while I was doing my graduate school in engineering, that's
when I started writing—a bunch more stories and the stories
in this book ended up being written toward the end of graduate school.
I also took a couple of classes at Harvard with Brad [Watson].
RB: You have something that many people who write
don't have, which is the security of a day job that you actually
like.
KI: Yeah, I feel a little bit guilty.
RB: You are not going to suffer much in pursuit
of…
KI: Well, writers are supposed to have a day job,
right? But it's assumed that it's one that you can bitch about.
I love my day job; it's great. The problem is that it's a bit too
much with the writing and having a full-time job. That's the only
issue. If I liked it less I would probably do it less and have more
time to write. The problem with research is that it's not the kind
of thing that you can do half way and just read half the literature
and expect to make a contribution. You have to be in it. The short-term
plan is to try to finish this novel, under extreme duress and sleep
depravation and see what happens.
RB: Meaning what?
 KI:
Which thing I'm going to opt for and [then] try to make a more reasonable
arrangement.
RB: It would be hard to determine if the way your
life is arranged now is not the perfect balance that allows you
to write well.
KI: That's just it. I have entertained thoughts
of quitting research, but part of me thinks that my writing might
become—instead of better—might become less interesting.
I know for sure that I would probably lose half my idea sources.
Another thing is the whole other aspect of suddenly being a writer.
I have been able to hide a little bit behind this day job and like,
"Well, I'm writing." In a sense it takes the pressure
off, which is nice. People who work full time and have to get something
publishable and marketable, that's a tough thing.
RB: People often say, "Well, if I had more
time, I could have made it better."
KI: I think if I had more time, the stories would
be the same. You work on a story until you are sick of it. Maybe
you get it done a little faster. But for me, at least, the process
is that—no matter how many hours I spend on it there is a
finite length of time before I think the ideas are matured enough
in my mind and I can really say what I want to say. And I think
that's independent of the hours spent. It just has to compost a
little while.
RB: That's specific to each story. Not that it
is predictable?
KI: No, it is somewhat variable. Some stories
come out easier than others do. Some stories you have to search
and search. One of the stories in the book, the story about the
phrenologist, is the kind of story where I had the idea of it, to
some extent the characters, but it took me a couple of months before
I knew what they wanted to be doing and how it was all supposed
to work. And then other stories just fall out more easily. Maybe
because they are more from my own experience. The story "Zilkowski's
Theorem," which was about mathematicians at a conference, was
by far the easiest story in the collection to write.
RB: I read it as an academic spoof.
KI: Well, spoof or satire, it's a little bit heightened
for sure. And that one just rolled off the tongue. That's low-hanging
fruit for an academic.
RB: If someone said, “This is a story about
academia,” I would’ve probably just passed it up. Nothing
new there, I would think. Except for Mark
Winegardner's trilogy of stories in his last collection were
hilarious.
KI: That's the direction people have gone recently,
huh, with academia, just cut up a little bit?
RB: It would seem so.
KI: It's so ripe for that.
RB: Richard
Russo's Straight Man did that.
KI: David Lodge, too.
RB: I've never read him.
KI: Neither have I, I just thought I would throw
that name out.
RB: One teacher of writing mentioned to me that
her students, regardless of their writing abilities, just don't
have a command of a body of general knowledge. They just don't seem
to know facts about the world.
KI: That reminds me of that Simpsons episode talking
about life experience, and one guy raises his hand and says he wrote
his thesis on life experience.
RB: This is where I expose my own cultural illiteracy
and say I have never watched the Simpsons. Anyway, your stories
used factual information and used historical references. Is there
a trend here, Daniel
Mason writes The Piano Tuner, David
Liss, The Coffee Trader, Arthur
Phillips creates a faux history in Prague, Darin
Strauss, The Real McCoy and Chang And Eng—is
the historical narrative easier or harder?
KI: I think it's neither. But it's interesting.
A lot of writers are dilettantes. That's what you want to be as
a writer. You don't necessarily want to have a great depth of knowledge
of the subject. It's more useful to know a little bit about a lot
of things. Anytime that you are reading, you are going to find things,
if you are reading with a writerly point of view, you are going
to find things that are so obviously ripe for fiction that it's
just a shame not to put them in stories.
RB: Your story "Children of Hunger"
in which the widow of a surgeon recounts his experiments with a
working class young man who gets gut shot.
KI: A French-Canadian peddler in the fur trade.
RB: What is this story's basis in fact?
KI: The central episode and the experiments are
from the history book. What's true is there was an accident where
this peddler got shot in the stomach and the resulting wound didn't
heal fully. And this doctor William Beaumont was able to actually
see into this guy's stomach. After a while he realized that he could
observe the digestive process, which before that hadn't been done.
There was no medical imaging back then. So he started doing these
freaky experiments, part of which involved actually tying strips
of food on strings and actually putting them into the stomach through
the stomach hole and pulling them out after lengths of time observing
the digestive process. Anyway, that's the true part. I didn't really
read anything about his wife. Oh no, I take that back. There was
an incident mentioned as a footnote—and this is really what
sparked it [my interest] —the voyager, Alex St. Martin, ran
away twice. I thought that was strange, this poor guy was unable
to work and had no means of support except Dr. Beaumont's stipend,
and yet he couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. But it made
sense; these experiments were so weird. Probably so dehumanizing,
and I don't know what protocols existed back then for human experimentation,
but I doubt they were too stringent in the Upper Peninsula in 1824.
So that's where the story came from, and the fact that this guy
was running away, and all I had to do was to construct a reason
for him to run away.
RB: You told the story from Beaumont's wife's
point of view.
A
lot of writers are dilettantes. That's what you want to be
as a writer. You don't necessarily want to have a great depth
of knowledge of the subject. It's more useful to know a little
bit about a lot of things. |
KI: Because she was the biggest gap in the historical
record. She really wasn't there. It mentions she was the prettiest
woman in Plattsburg and that's pretty much all the press she got.
And I wondered what she was thinking about this whole situation.
Beaumont's story had been told, and I am hesitant to rewrite history,
to tell it from Beaumont's point of view and have the events come
out any other way than they did, just for personal reasons [chuckles].
Her story—I was interested in the effect of these experiments
on another person and not the experimentee. People don't tend to
think about the influence that science, which is this chilly rational
act, can have on the lives of the people around them. It's just
like writing, for a lot of people it's a very consuming activity,
and any activity like that is going to jostle the worlds of the
people around the scientist the researcher.
RB: There is an equation in the title story, is
that gibberish or does it have some application to something in
the story?
KI: That's the equation that the story started
from. It's a very famous non-linear equation describing, well, a
lot of things, but partly describing the interaction of predator
and prey. And of what happens if you plot this equation over time
and sometimes the predators are a large population and the prey
has died off and other times vice versa. What happened was I was
taking a class at MIT in graduate school. And it was in Non Linear
Control taught by this famous French professor. We had to do class
projects. It was the beginning of Spring. I remember because the
windows were open and everyone was staring out the window while
everyone else was giving their presentations. This student got up—tall,
red hair, glasses, buck teeth—the whole shot and he started
talking and he said something like, "It's springtime, and the
birds are singing, and so I thought I would talk about love."
And the class is seventeen guys and we are looking at him like,
"What the hell are you talking about?" But what he had
done was develop this mathematical model of two people's relationship,
their interaction, modeled on the predator prey equations and then
he derived a control system, and if you satisfied this equation
which was half a page long. The people would come together and it
if it wasn't satisfied they would diverge. And I just thought it
was hilarious and strange and sort of touching and weird.
RB: He was sincere?
KI: It was a bit tongue and cheek. But I think
he was masking his sincerity [laughs]. He was probably cautiously
optimistic. But that was the basis for that story and in some sense
it was the basis for a lot of the stories in the book. Until then,
I wanted to write, but I hadn't really figured out a way to do it,
in a way that felt human or interesting. And that was sort of a
small Eureka moment.
RB: If someone asked me what these stories were
about I wouldn't say they were about science.
KI: About scientists.
RB: And I wouldn't call a phrenologist a scientist.
[laughs]
KI: No, a pseudoscientist.
RB: And he [the phrenologist] is not the interesting
person in this story.
KI: He's bit mopey, isn't he?
RB: And then there's the story about the Indian
agent, is that about science?
KI: No that's not. There are a few stories in
the book that aren't scientific, and I think the overriding them
is one of frustrated scientists, but I don't think it rigorously
holds to that.
RB: You've published stories in a number of literary
journals and the decision of what to include in this collection
was based on what, the centrality of science?
KI: To some extent. Right when I was finishing
my thesis, I realized I had enough stories for a book. Eight stories,
two hundred pages, whatever. So Peter [KI's agent] and I decided
to send out, "I know the perfect place for this book and I
think they'll love it." So we sent it to The Dial Press and
they liked it but they said, "We want it, but would you be
interested in writing some more stories about science." Four
of the stories in the book were in the original manuscript I submitted.
And there were four other stories. I thought, "That sounds
great. I'll rewrite the whole book, I don't care." But it made
a lot of sense. When I looked back at that original manuscript there
wasn't really a central theme. But those scientific stories were
the most recent stories I had been working on. I had two or three
other stories that were half done which were scientifically based.
The theme of the book emerged after the sale of it and during the
final writing of the last stories.
RB: The intention was for "On The Nature
Of Human Romantic Interaction" to be the title story?
KI: Yeah, from the beginning I thought that would
be a good title for the book. It seemed to fit the general theme
of the stories.
RB: How many stories do you have lying around…
not lying around but…
KI: How many stories have I written?
RB: That are publishable.
KI: Probably nine, maybe ten.
RB: [both laugh] Any carcasses?
KI: Beside the book, maybe there are three or
four other stories that are decent. The one's in the original manuscript
were decent. But I don't know that they were anything special. And
well, I think you can tell when someone is writing about something
that they care about or that they know a bit about or that extra
little spark, for me at least, when I read the science-based stories,
some of them seem to have that. Whereas the others, maybe not so
much. They feel a bit more generic. They don't feel like me.
RB: What fiction writers do you think write about
science well?
KI: This is going to get ugly—just because
I haven't read that much. When I went to have that meeting with
the Dial Press, one of the editors gave me Andrea Barrett's book,
saying, "You've got to read this." And I read it and it
was kind of depressing, "Oh fuck, she's already written them
all."
RB: Which book?
 KI:
Ship Fever. Like in the feeling was, this is how I wanted
to do it, and I think she does it very well. And she has a great
balance between scientific fact and idea and character. But the
first story that I read that really impressed me as a smart way
to write about science, an engaging way, was a story by Johanna
Scott called "Concerning Mold upon the Skin." It was about
Leeuwenhoek, one of the inventors or the inventor of the microscope.
And it was this gorgeous story about this guy who became obsessed
with this development of the microscope at the expense of his family.
It was a strange and weird story. I read this years ago in Best
American Stories maybe ten years ago. I thought, "Well
God, this is it." And there are not too many other people writing
about science. There is science fiction, which is different because
it's often not about character but idea. The character-based writers;
there is another school it seems. They are more concerned with scientific
idea. I would almost separate the two in an academic way: We have
people who do theory and we have people who do applied. I am applied,
I think. And there are other writers who are more theoretical.
RB: Doesn't it seem strange, I find it strange
that it would be such a special thing for writers to write about
things that have science as basis?
KI: A couple things. One, it seems there is a
barrier to entry. You have to know these things. To some extent
that's not true. Writers are very good at learning enough about
something to write about it convincingly. And to be honest, you
don't have to know that much about anything to be able to write
about it somewhat convincingly. You want to know a little bit about
it. That's all you need. The other thing is that a lot of writers
really don't like science. Wouldn't like the side of studying it.
There is a reason that writers were English majors, probably because
they hated physics.
RB: [laughs]
KI: That may be the greater factor. You don't
find that many writers who are interested in science. That said,
it seems like a fair amount of people like to read about science.
I mean the Dial Press bought my book. They thought that people would
buy the book. So I don't know why people don't write about science.
I don't understand it. Especially since science is more and more
part of the popular culture. Part of people's everyday consciousness
and you can't get away from it. You look on CNN on the home page
and they'll have, not even scientific breakthroughs. They'll have
what I'd call mid-level breakthroughs, the "might someday"
stories, where the last line is "And might some day lead to…"
and then you just sigh and ignore the thing.
RB: Maybe they don't have that People
magazination hook the characters that make these stories accessible?
KI: They are there, that's what I don't get. But
it's just not been done yet. Or not a lot. But it will, I don't
see how it can't not be?
RB: What's your novel about?
KI: I can talk about what I know about it. I'm
only on page one hundred. There are two story lines; one is concerning
a scientific expedition to the Upper Peninsula in the 1840's to
search for evidence of the lost tribes of Israel. There was a theory
back then that—it's kind of a long story—the lost tribes
of Israel…
RB: I hope it's a long story.
KI: Yeah, A three hundred-page story, actually
…had been in North America. There is an expedition searching
for evidence of them. And there is another story, a minister from
Massachusetts who is traveling to the Midwest to track down this
expedition which contains his son who is a bit wayward. Prodigal,
if you will. So, they would meet at some point and hilarity ensues
and I don't know what happens.
RB: Good. This is one of those silly speculative
questions, but take a shot. Do you have any sense of what your worldview
would be like if you hadn't grown up in Michigan?
KI: Jesus.
RB: You've been to Ireland, living here for a
while.
KI: Well…
RB: Alright, how does having grown up in the Midwest,
uh, "inform" your point of view?
KI: Someone asked me that a while ago, and I had
absolutely no answer for it. I don’t know I can't answer without
resorting to cliches about what Midwesterners are like compared
to what people on the East Coast are like.
RB: I've been living on the East Coast for thirty
years, as an expatriated Chicagoan, and it's still a shock to the
system.
KI: Oh, it's the most insular place I have ever
been. My indicator of when I knew things were strange? When I came
here, I turned on the sports on the news to get the out of town
scores. They don't show the out-of-town scores. I mean it takes
three seconds to flash the out-of-town scores. Literally, three
seconds. They don't do it! It's like it doesn't exist. How can they
not show the out-of-town scores? It still bothers me.
RB: There is something so healthy about the rest
of the country.
KI: [giggles]
RB: That seems not to be present here.
KI: And the question is "How does this inform
people's writing?"
RB: Hmm.
KI: I don't know.
RB: Mark Winegardner, head of the Florida State
writing program and soon to be the author of the continuing Godfather
saga…
…
none of these guys are too burdened with the writer's ego.
People who are serious and have done it enough have been humbled
enough times to have checked their egos at the door. |
KI: Winegardner. That's Italian huh? Must be Sicilian.
RB: [laughs] He writes a great brief for great
American writing coming from the Midwest.
KI: Sherwood Anderson and… Obviously the
center of gravity of publishing and writing is in New York, and
it's natural that New York writers tend to get a disproportionate
amount of attention. But it comes down to human nature. A lot of
the New York writers know the New York reviewers and editors, so
to some extent it can be explained. But there is a lot of great
writing in the Midwest and other parts of the country. I don't know
that it's under appreciated, maybe just under publicized. People
who know, know. Charles Baxter is a good example. Inexplicable,
he shouldn't be read by everyone… I don't want to talk about
Southern writing…there's no defined Midwestern school?
RB: Not unless you accept that it's really everything
American. What would Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald be? Anyway,
has a lot changed since you've have published a book? That is, your
relationship with the lit world and it's auxiliaries.
KI: In the past I had no relationship with that
world.
RB: You had an agent. And your workshops and teachers.
KI: I viewed the workshops as classes that I went
to and my agent as this mythical person that I talked to on the
phone occasionally. I didn't have any sense of belonging to a writing
community or the writing world at all, really, until the book was
bought. And until recently now that book is out, meeting a few people--writers
and things like that.
RB: Anything unusual about that? Surprises?
KI: Yeah, in the sense that I had very little
expectations, and I think I was blessed with very low expectations.
So they'll say, "They want you to be on this radio show."
"Radio show! I'll do it." So I am surprised by how much
fun it is and how little like business it is. In the kind of setting
I am used to, there is much more criticism and heartbreak and in
some sense, that's how advancement is made in science. But the whole
writing thing, it's not that I don't take it seriously, but the
business side of it and all the surrounding stuff is incredibly
interesting and fun. And I haven't done it enough to be tired of
it or jaded by it.
RB: There seems to be a lot of young writers being
published in this area now.
KI: Yeah there's a bunch. You have the omnipresent
Steve
Almond in Somerville. Lise Haines is local. Chris Catelonni
and he's very cool guy and he lives in Arlington. Michael Lowenthal.
And Ben Cavell who you talked to, Matthew Pearl. And I am sure I
am forgetting twenty other writers.
RB: Yeah, me too. What's that like meeting writers
who have just published their first books? Is it competitive?
KI: There is a sense of shared, confused joy.
The good thing about and the thing I have been surprised a little
bit about is that none of these guys are too burdened with the writer's
ego. People who are serious and have done it enough have been humbled
enough times to have checked their egos at the door. So I was a
bit surprised by that I always carried the expectation, going through
graduate school, that I had a bit of a grudge against the people
who were actually doing it. Thinking, "Well they are all stuck-up
bitches anyway." But they are not. At least the people I have
met are very down-to-earth and cool types. These days you are just
happy to get something published. The odds seem fairly remote and
everyone has been telling you for years how remote they are, I believe
it. So getting something out there and getting published and being
happy with the publication, I think you get a sense of gratitude
from most writers that you talk to. I don't know if that's different
from the past and I am sure it varies from person to person.
RB: You recently appeared with some the people
we mentioned.
KI: They [readings] can be great and energizing
when they are good, which is something of a rarity, but it is a
bit of a lost opportunity. It ends up being a live book on tape.
I don't like so much, not just reading but the whole exposure of
the writer. I almost think it was better when I was twelve years
old and I thought that living people didn't write books. And seriously
thought that until I was seventeen. [chuckles]
RB: I read an Ann Beattie Writers on Writing
piece that talks about author overexposure and my
recent conversation with Graham Swift echoes that.
KI: The reading experience is another level of
suspension of disbelief. Another layer. And it's a big one. You
don't want to think that book that you are reading was written by
the guy you just saw read and you are imagining him in studio apartment
in his underwear.
RB: As Tim
O’Brien would describe himself.
KI: His fingers stained with Cheetos. It can kill
the reading experience.
RB: As you say the good ones are treasured moments.
I've seen Will Self declaim a story for twenty minutes (from memory)
with no glitches.
KI: Yeah, the good ones rock. They sometimes let
you re-see the written work, which is unbelievable. I saw Frederick
Busch read a story when I was an undergraduate, that, God, I
thought I was going to pass out.
RB: A great writer too. I have begun to view audio
books as a different thing now. The book, the movie, the audio.
KI: It works in other ways too. I have seen stories
read, that read extremely well and when you go to read them it doesn't
work on the page and you feel gypped, like you got taken.
RB: In the Best American Stories you
are in, I heard someone read the Trevanian story. I only knew of
him as a thriller writer, but this story about a rivalry in a Basque
village was incredible, and I had the same reservations that you
just voiced.
 KI:
Oh boy, this is going to get embarrassing, I haven't read that one
yet. [laughs] There are about four I haven't gotten to.
RB: You were an undergraduate, did some writing,
thought about your commitment to it. You did graduate work in?
KI: Mechanical engineering and robotics.
RB: And then you continued to write and when
you shipped off your stories to various places?
KI: It was pretty standard, we would send them
to The New Yorker, and then when they rejected them…
RB: [laughs]
KI: We would send them to everyone else. That's
the basic situation. I was thrilled to get in the Paris Review
and Zoetrope, which is revitalizing literary magazines.
RB: It may be my entrenched position, but I am
not seeing a diminution of literature in the culture.
KI: Did you think there was…a general trend
over how many years are we talking? What scale?
RB: Do you remember people talking about the death
of the novel?
KI: Yeah people are always saying that.
RB: Exactly.
God,
I have no worries about literature. If you have engineers
wanting to be writers…maybe I'm more optimistic than
you. |
KI: And it's always bullshit.
RB: You’re smarter than me because I would
worry about it, "Oh, there's a reason why some one is saying
this, let me think about it." Of course as an undergraduate
I fell prey to the notion that civilization was declining. It also
became a post-graduate sport.
KI: I'm sure that it comes back to statistics.
What's the sample size? I'm sure there are months and months that
go by there are more crappy novels published than good ones. And
then you have years that's the opposite. Writing seems to me such
an instinctively human thing, I can imagine but I would be very
surprised to find over a sampling over x years that fewer really
good books being written. I'm not interested in writing experimental
literature, but I do think it interesting how writing adapts to
the changes in society. The obvious thing being science and topic.
Topics changing. But also form. Different ways that people are writing
novels. I'm always shocked at how much good stuff is being written
and how many good books are out there. It seems almost overwhelming.
The books are there. The problem seems to be that a lot of people
don't care.
RB: Right. And that will be determinant. People
can write all they want but without readers…
KI: I think of literature as a larger thing, with
a capitol L. The books that remain. I can't see that being diminished.
I can see the primacy of reading decreasing in the culture, of course.
It makes sense in an age when there wasn't any competition, now
you have Super Nintendo. So how are you going to compete with that?
God, I have no worries about literature. If you have engineers wanting
to be writers…maybe I'm more optimistic than you are. Maybe
it's a failure of my imagination.
RB: I'm not pessimistic, I just think that the
lit world is a constant number but the other worlds seem to get
larger. Which makes the writer somewhat marginal and a more difficult
way to live one's life. Let's agree that there is a future for you.
KI: At least for the next three years, let's say.
RB: Is that how long your novel will take?
KI: Another year or so. I can't imagine spending
ten years on a novel. I'd get so sick of it. I'd just quit. Quit
that novel for sure.
RB: What do you think about writers that do that?
KI: Maybe in a few years I will be the kind of
person that will want to spend that long on a single book. Or will
find a topic that is rich enough or have I'll have enough of a stretch
of time that I can create something that is worthy of that much
work. But right now I am a little too impatient to spend that much
time on a single book. I think the people who do that, god bless
them, because it's not like they are thinking the longer they spend
on it, the more they are going to get paid for it. They are thinking
the better it is going to be. Look at Brad
Watson. He spent six or seven years on his book. And it's a
gift to readers.
RB: Donna
Tartt spent ten years on The Little Friend and eight
years on Secret History, Sandra
Cisneros spent ten years on Caramelo…
KI: If you can do that.
RB: What I noticed is that business expects a
certain productivity from writers.
KI: Well it's an industry they need to know when
the product is going to ship.
RB: Very few writers have the luxury to take a
long time…
KI: The luxury or the courage to say it isn't
done. Yeah, that's a reality and the result of that is you probably
get a fair number of books that aren't quite done. But, what are
you going to do?
RB: What are you going to do? Well, good, see
you in about two years
KI: Yeah, I can do two years.
____
|
Posted:
July 16, 2003
