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Matthew
Derby
Author
of Super Flat Times answers some e-mail questions
from Matt Borondy
 Posted:
May 9, 2003
© 2003 Matt Borondy
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this interview
Matthew Derby has an MFA in writing from Brown University.
His stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Fence,
5 Trope, Pindeldyboz, and Failbetter, and
he is Associate Fiction Editor at 3rd Bed. He also
contributed to the debut issue of The Believer. His
first book, a collection of stories entitled Super Flat
Times, has recently been released. He and his wife live
in Providence, Rhode Island.
Super Flat Times has been characterized
as "an incredibly post-modern and Orwellian sci-fi novel"
that is "almost impossible to describe." Perhaps
we could start this off by having you describe the book and
give some thoughts on being compared to Orwell.
it's a collection of short stories, all set during an historical
period that has not yet occurred, one in which a great many
people are killed off in secret by the government. Each story
represents the final thoughts of a victim of this genocide,
and the stories themselves have been collected and archived
by a translator some years after the end of the super flat
times.
i think that the book has been compared with orwell because...wait,
i actually have no idea. it's sort of a demented comparison,
isn't it? i think the publishers just wanted to contextualize
the book a little, to prepare it for a potential readership.
because i feel (or perhaps 'hope' is the more accurate term)
that it's actually closer in spirit and form to a lydia davis
collection, but maybe there is not so much crossover in terms
of audience. or maybe the comparison has more to do with the
fact that, just as 1984 was actually a book about
post-war britain, i think that super flat times is
a book about the present, but with the navigational parameters
tweaked a bit. i read and was taken by 1984 when
i was in junior high, but i didn't look at it again until
after i was done with SFT. i was surprised to find
a lot of thematic similarities, but i can't claim that these
were intentional.
i did look at the film Logan's Run a great deal
while writing the book, and not enough people are comparing
SFT to that (hint: more people should do this). I
tried to study some depictions of the future that seem dated
and outmoded from a contemporary perspective, because i wanted
to investigate the space in which our idea of the future (which
is a thing that, by definition, doesn't actually exist - it
is nothing more than a conceptual repository for the narrative
arcs we make for ourselves) comes up against our actual experience
of the future as it crystallizes into the present. i think
we deal with the relentless disappointment we experience as
the illusion of the future becomes the reality of the present
by guffawing at our past illusions, when in fact those depictions
are the only real-world evidence we have of our past aspirations.
there's something very heartbreaking and true about these
artifacts.
You have an MFA from Brown, where you've also taught
creative writing. How did you end up there? What would you
tell someone who is considering going into debt for an advanced
degree in creative writing?
i applied to brown after finding out that carole maso taught
there - i think she was director of the program at the time.
anyway, i had just discovered her book The Art Lover
and had been pretty blown away - stylistically, it was such
a radical departure from anything i'd previously come to know
as literature. at that point, i had never seen anything like
it. i'd read some barthelme, but i wasn't really aware of
the full spectrum of narrative possibility, so that book had
a really destabilizing effect. i felt i really needed to work
with her. i don't know how i actually got into the program,
though, because my writing sample was really weak. i guess
i was just tremendously lucky.
i wouldn't apply to a grad program unless it offered funding
of some sort - it's a great resource for writers to have a
few years to write and get paid, but i think it would be pretty
risky to chuck a whole lot of money into a program that has
very little to offer in terms of financial rewards afterward.
you're much better off taking a stupid, meaningless job and
writing frantically for two years. you'll probably learn more
about what it means to write, especially if you work in an
ugly, dingy city in the midwest. or utica, ny.
How long ago did you start writing these stories?
Were they affected by your teaching?
i started writing them just before i graduated from brown,
in 1999. i don't think they were affected by my teaching -
why, do they look like that?
The website
for Super Flat Times is quite
compelling and unique. (I especially like the "deleted
scenes" feature.) What was your involvement, if any,
in making that site?
thanks! i built the whole thing myself, except for the audio
portion of the deleted scenes, which were recorded by my friends
tim heidecker and eric wareheim. i spent a ridiculous amount
of time working on the site, and i'm not really sure why.
maybe it was a way of dealing with the terribly anxious period
between the completion of the book and the printing - a period
in which i don't think i was able to write a single useful
line of prose. i guess i also enjoy working with flash - i
can't play video games in my free time - i keep dying. i've
died so many times in a single afternoon...anyway, working
with multimedia stuff is i guess what i do with my free time
instead of playing video games. looking back, i probably shouldn't
have invested so much time in it - i mean, it's a website.
Some of your stories have appeared in online journals
such as failbetter.com.
You used to run a literary site called Impossible Object.
Has the world of digital publishing had a significant effect
on your writing style? How do you see the evolution of web
literature unfolding over the next decade or so in relation
to traditional publishing outlets?
i don't think that the internet has changed the way i write,
necessarily, but it certainly has opened up a new set of possibilities
for myself and other writers in terms of finding an audience,
and i think that has had a pretty profound impact. when i
started writing, there were very few feasible options in terms
of publishing work, and even then, the feasibility was questionable.
there was also a predictability - i wasn't aware, then, of
journals like conjunctions or grand street,
and everything else was just too...agrarian. every lit journal
i was exposed to was named after a tree, or an antique milliner's
tool, or something having to do with the ocean. i would have
been a little embarrassed to place my work in one of those
journals. i'm going to get misty eye'd and very sentimental
here, but the internet, even early on, facilitated a much
broader, more engaging and complex discourse. my work would
never have been published anywhere ten years ago (although
maybe that would have been a good thing), but it found a readership
in a group of similarly disgruntled, displaced readers who
wanted something else.
Your book is most prominently blurbed by Heidi Julavits,
who is co-edits The
Believer, a new magazine from Dave
Eggers which has been a topic of much discussion on Identity
Theory and other literary websites. You happen to have a story
in The Believer's debut issue. What are your impressions
of that magazine's ideals, and, more broadly, of this whole
Eggers phenomenon?
heidi julavits is an immortal. she, vendela vida, and ed
park are all working their asses off on the believer.
i was visiting ben and heidi recently and there were proofs
of the magazine all over the place - their apartment looked
like...a place with a lot of papers everywhere. we'd be having
a conversation and she'd fire off these brilliant, lucid observations
while proofreading a piece she'd just picked up off the floor.
her devotion to the project is really stirring. i think the
believer is an astounding piece of work - it's the sort
of magazine i've always wished i could get my hands on. i
don't read most magazines, so i don't know what else is out
there, but i don't think the believer really has
a peer, does it? except, perhaps, for mcsweeney's?
i don't know much about dave eggers, just that a.) he's written
two books that i've enjoyed immensely; b.) he edits a phenomenal
journal; and c.) he gets a lot of people really riled up,
some in a good way, some in a bad way, about literature and
our relationship to it. i think that, in itself, is an accomplishment.
i don't want to come off as an apologist, as i know it's a
highly charged topic of debate, but one can't really deny
that he's out there, doing this shit every day. all i do is
collect ebay feedback.
What are you reading these days?
i just read Salvador by Joan Didion, and now i am
reading White Teeth.
It seems to be commonplace for young writers to release
a collection of stories and then follow it up with a novel.
Is this the case for you, and if so, when can we expect the
novel? (If not, what the heck are you working on?)
i don't think i'll be able to write anything else. i am really
heavily in debt and in order to get something substantial
written i'd need at least a few months of uninterrupted time.
so this is likely the last thing i'll do, at least for a long
time.
Bonus Question: As a former Austinite, my eyebrows
were raised when I saw that you're doing a reading at Emo's
in Austin on May 15th. This is not a typical literary venue.
What's going on there? Are you sure you can handle the pressure
of performing on the same stage once used by the great Wesley
Willis?
i am shitting my pants. neal pollack is running a reading
series there, and he invited me. i have never been farther
south than virginia. i'm certain i'll be killed.
Matt Borondy
is the editor of Identity Theory. You may write him at m@identitytheory.com,
and if you're really bored, you can read his weblog.
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