Coinciding with the publication of her latest book of short stories, Ann Beattie visited American University in October 2005 to honor her mentor and professor, Frank Turaj, retiring professor of literature and to whom Follies: New Stories is dedicated. At two separate appearances on campus, Ms. Beattie charmed people with her humorous, blunt, and spirited conversation.
It was with that same spirit that she engaged in an interview with Folio, answering questions over e-mail while trying to avoid the season's last hurricanes and return to her home in Key West, Florida. Her experience and insight comes through in a distinct voice in any form of communication, and reveal both a comfort and wry vexation with not just the writing life, but writing in general. She speaks of it like a constant companion, with fondness, exasperation, and satisfaction, an old friend whose excuses she's all heard before, but for whom she still leaves porch light on every evening.
Folio:The New Yorker rejected twenty-two of your submissions before publishing "A Platonic Relationship" in 1974. How did you maintain your focus and tenacity before your breakout story?
Ann Beattie: Oh . . . I was young. You're right in the words you select to ask the question, but back then, I would have thought "focus" meant putting on warm pajamas before I did the writing I did for hours every night, and "tenacity" I would have thought of as Can I continue to play this fascinating game and have fun? My parents tell me that as a small child, I would play with blocks and they'd hold their breath because I never gave up and the pile went so high, it was just a question of when it would topple. Now I know what they felt like; I write stories and feel the last block I put on might be the one to make the whole thing come crashing down.
Folio: I read that you started writing because you were "bored with graduate school," which strikes me as a little ironic, as Folio is populated with students in graduate school to write. Do you feel education gets in the way of the individual creative process? Does the real writing only start upon graduation? You taught writing workshops for a period of time. What is your opinion of them now?
Ann Beattie: For the last 4 years, I've taught literature and creative writing at the University of Virginia one semester a year. I have mixed feelings about writing programs, as I think most professors and students do. On a good day, when I've explained more about a student's work than she or he knew and also come up with a solution for how to fix whatever problem I see (the smart ones rarely listen to exact advice, which is entirely right), I think I'm smart, functional, and doing something interesting and important. I don't suspect that my dentist thinks anything different, ultimately. I don't think education gets in the way, but people have different capacities for receiving information and instruction, and I doubt that any writing program will often benefit a student in the way he or she thinks, though there may be many other benefits, and they may also kick in later.
Folio: You've said before that short stories are your preferred medium; young writers are often told that short stories will not get them published, but they are what launched your career. Why do you prefer writing short stories? What purpose do they serve for a young writer?
Ann Beattie: I have no idea why I prefer writing short stories, except that in the moment, the gratification is so intense, those few times I get a very good first draft-- suddenly (relatively speaking) there's a little something that didn't exist before: beginning middle and end. I still can't get through most "classic" short stories - those things you find in anthology after anthology and think Ugh, Mrs. So-And-So made me read that in high school. Maybe a lot of us are writing to banish those anthologies. If you think you know what a story is, read Thom Jones, Joy Williams, Deborah Eisenberg, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Richard Ford. Then read "Midair" by Frank Conroy and re-read Joyce's "The Dead."
Folio: You've spoken about why you write short stories, but what makes a short story successful? What elements do you look for in your own personal reading? What gets you and keeps you hooked? Are these qualities any different from the novels you read?
Ann Beattie: What makes a story successful for the reader is not necessarily what makes it successful for the writer. I'm often so amused by some little in-joke that I inordinately love something just for that. I think a story is successful if you really appreciate the shape of it, the weight, the clarity . . . if you think whether you can "afford" the story-just the things you'd look for in a ring. And, of course, amber is much prized. What keeps me hooked, as a reader, has to do with what's beneath the surface, and the amount of surface tension. I tell my students that readers like to feel smart-to feel that they're discovering something, even if you're really behind the scenes, pulling the marionette strings. I also love commas. Harold Brodkey's story called "His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft." Wouldn't you read that?
Folio: How do you put a collection of short stories together? Is the recent development of the "novel in short stories" changing how you think of putting a book of stories together?
Ann Beattie: When I was much more prolific, I put a collection together by putting everything I'd written in the past couple of years into the book. I've only worked with a few editors over the years, and sometimes one has had a very good idea about why the order should be changed, or even said that a story should be dropped (or I've said it), and the role of the copy editor who points out that I've mentioned Excedrin in more than half the stories, and that quite a few of the characters listen to the same song by Patsy Cline is invaluable. But I think I have a pretty good sense, now, about what should be dropped-not that it's bad, necessarily, but that it doesn't fit, somehow-and as anyone who has worked with me will tell you, I'm almost always amenable to leaving something out entirely. I like white space, breathing room. I like the way Joan Didion's "Play it as it Lays" looks on the page, physically. The so-called "novel in stories" . . . I do have a bias against it, because it seems like too easy a game. It sort of throws me off as a reader, if I keep recognizing the characters reoccurring. It's the Excedrin problem, in a way. That said, I've read some I've liked. I cringe to say that sometimes it's an editorial decision, to sell books, and the writers really aren't the ones who conceived of their work as a "novel" (as though that distinguishes it! Poets rise up!).
Folio: Most of your stories begin with a short first line (usually less than ten words). Is this a conscious choice? Do your terse openings conform to a larger writing aesthetic? Does it take you as long to craft one of the shorter stories like "Lofty" or "Snow" as it does to craft one of the longer stories like "Summer People" or "Where You'll Find Me"?
Ann Beattie: I think the to-the-point first line often happens in my stories because I'm thinking of the simplest way to begin . . . to begin for myself, because it's a rough draft. I could hardly argue that it's a great working method, because, say, "Carleyville left late because of the rain" ("Hurricane Caryleyville") is inherently inspirational. But it sure doesn't confuse me, and if there's suddenly someone named Carleyville, and he's late for something, and if I know what the weather is like . . . it seems an enormous amount to go on. I revise, of course, so the entire first line could go, but I don't think that happens very much, if at all. It seems indelible, even if I'm the one who wrote it.
Stories that are quite short, such as "Lofty" and "Snow" were written very quickly and hardly revised. I was teaching when I wrote "Snow" and had asked the writing students to see what McInerney was up against when he wrote "Bright Lights, Big City" (love that comma!), and I did the assignment with them - finding that my "you" couldn't intrude until after a space break.
Folio: In your short story collection Where You'll Find Me, the piece "In the White Night" plays off the thoughts and remarks of a large group of characters. Is it difficult for you to write several characters that interact and interject almost all at once? How do you reign in several characters and focus on story? Do you spend time getting to know each character personally, or do they more often work as tools to unfolding the story?
Also, in Where You'll Find Me, many of the stories are extremely short. Do you find it difficult to develop characters and plot in such a short amount of time?
Do you feel there's a significant difference between omniscient first-person voices and omniscient third-person narrators? You make use of both narrative types, yet each is as introspective and knowledgeable as the other. Do you even see a difference? Similarly, what are your thoughts on second-person narration?
Do you find it hard to write from the point of view of characters that are very different from yourself? For example, in "Taking Hold," you present the perspective of a 19-year-old boy. Was that a challenge?
Ann Beattie: When I was nine I had surgery, and one of my most distinct visual memories of my father, who was 6'2", was of him sitting carefully on the bed, as if he had no weight that could possibly disturb anyone, after doing what he could to clear a place of toy tigers and smiling dolls. I think in that moment I understood adulthood in a way I hadn't before. It stuck in my mind, obviously - though such exactly remembered moments rarely make it into my fiction. Being sick, myself, was the genesis of that story - though it was the grown-up me that knew about Magritte and what connotations language carried.
Folio: You have such a cinematic eye for surfaces, and an ear for understatement. In "Hurricane Carleyville" when Fiona says, "So you tell them little things, you point out the road markers, rather than talking about the big wreck on the highway," would you say this is similar to your writing style?
Ann Beattie: If I can see the landscape, I can put people in the world of the story. It's very visual, even if it might not register that way with the reader ("Carleyville left late because of the rain.") I have every texture and tone I need there-In the character's name, in the alliteration of "left late", and the rain . . . suddenly a very specific rain, for my story alone! Really, it was more than enough to begin. Yeah, I watch surfaces. In our house in Virginia, my husband hung a relief he'd carved on the living room wall (he is perverse: the room is charcoal grey; his relief of two intertwined figures is verdigris), and at a certain time of day, just for a matter of minutes, a shadow is cast and the peacock feathers (homage to Flannery O'Connor) in the vase above the bookcase make a strange foliage shadow that seems to suspend the real and reflected figures in a forest - but all the while, you know you're looking at quickly changing shadows and reflections, as well as the original object. When I figure out the writerly equivalent of that, I'm going to pat myself on the back, you can well believe.
Folio: In your newest book of short stories, Follies, many times the surprising "action" of the story doesn't occur until towards the end of the piece-as exemplified in "The Last Odd Day In LA" and "Find and Replace." How do you go about pacing the story so that the final reveal is so effectively shocking, or, similarly, how do you know when to locate the exact moment of revealing, so as to maximize its affect on the reader?
Ann Beattie: In "Flechette Follies" and in "That Last Odd Day in L.A." you're right about the action. I think I distrust action, to tell the truth. I sort of acknowledge that it has to happen (though I can think of action that happens as metaphor only, or that happens because things accrue - Eva Figes, for example), but "plot" seems too big, too amorphous, too much like some cops show. My best guess about what's happening is that even when revised, the scaffolding of my working method remains. Since I distrust neat endings, and since sometimes I can write very nicely, I often write the ending, only to append another, because I don't want to slip through just-you know-literarily. "The Infamous Fall of Howell The Clown," one of my friend Richard Bausch's favorite of my stories, has about three endings because I knew I'd be ending precisely and perhaps even lyrically, but the ending was a cheat. The same thing happens with "Park City." Often, I intuit just where I could end with a sort of flourish, so I do indeed write it, wince, and write on. Also, in terms of the action of a story, whatever happens (the deer appearing in the Hollywood Hills, in "Last Odd Day", for example) has a different weight depending on when, in time, it happens, of course. Many other things happen after the deer epiphany, but to me they're all bells and whistles-even the gun. I want the reader to be haunted by what's already happened, not by the last-minute fireworks, as it were.
Folio: Many of your stories contain unconventional family dynamics. Why are so many of your characters in nontraditional relationships?
Ann Beattie: I'm tempted to just say that I don't know how to answer this question, because my initial response was along the lines of: Who's in a traditional relationship?, though I suppose there are people whose unions seem more conventional, on the surface. We're all used to people saying, for example, that BTK [editor's note: Dennis Radner, convicted serial killer, called himself BTK, which stood for Bind, Torture, Kill] was a bit mean as the dog warden, but he was married with kids and the pastor of his church, or whatever he was. However, he was BTK. I don't trust surfaces or formal presentations-I guess I trust them, but I don't think there's much there-so dealing with improvisations that I tacitly admit, as the writer, aren't traditional unions, seems easier.
Folio: Is the bowl in "Janus" based off a real bowl? Have you ever had an intense relationship with an inanimate object similar to Andrea's relationship with the bowl?
Ann Beattie: I rarely try to write anything people suggest I write - in fact, I simply can't - but when the idea was floated that I might try a children's book, it seemed like an interesting idea. My attempt misfired entirely, turning into a story subsequently published in "The New Yorker" about a real estate agent who believes that a bowl, given to her by her lover, has magic powers. There is no such bowl, exactly, but I was conjuring up a fictional bowl based on the many ceramic vases and cups and bowls I'd bought over the years from a wonderful ceramicist named Scott McDowell. His were just too wonderful, and wouldn't do for fictional purposes because (1) they were his, not mine and (2) they already existed and were quite fine as they were. But his bowls, with their near-Twombly markings and gilded-cellular bits of color that seemed to float . . . certainly they'd registered with me so deeply that they almost moved into place as I wrote.
I'm not a collector, though I have boxes of old photographs (not of anybody I know), certain glasses to which I'm deeply attached, a note written in fountain pen from Harry Mathews about one of my novels that I so prize, I asked him if he could re-write it after I stupidly sprayed furniture polish that melted the writing into a blur. I think he thought I was kidding. The first four lines are still visible, and I can make out the others, and it's still on my desk in Key West, where the pin cushion dancing donkey with its crossed arms and ballet tutu towers over it, as my husband peeks out from behind Harry's note, only his eyes visible. He was paparazzi'd by me in the bath tub at the Hotel Luna, in Amalfi.
Folio: You have been a great comfort to me in the past when I've thought I've got to have a plan, a character history, some sort of map before I embark on a piece of writing. Where do you get your inspiration? What has been the most unusual spark that began a story?
Ann Beattie: I don't know that it qualifies as a real spark, but I remember long ago, going somewhere in New Hampshire, where the hostess had put out many, many desserts on a buffet table, and suddenly looking at the table and feeling like I was in a time warp: it as similar to the table at Deaconess Hospital in Boston, where I'd gone many times to sit with a friend who had AIDS while he was in the transfusion room. Believe it or not, that place had been the best sweet shop in the city. I'd tried several times to include my friend's death in a story-never as the subject, but as some part of some other story (keep it at a distance . . .), but I'd failed completely. I couldn't even give him a fictional name. At least, not until I saw that table, in another location, years afterwards, and wrote the story's beginning the next day. Roger Angell, my editor at the "New Yorker", came up with another of his clever fictionalizations of real places, because the "New Yorker's" legal department always had problems with real settings-so Deaconess became Bishopgate. Once I started, there was very little revision. "There we were, in the transfusion room at the end of the corridor at Bishopgate Hospital," etc. Yup: there we were.
Folio: You came to visit AU to honor one of our retiring professors, Frank Turaj. Have any stories you can share? I was told to ask about a hearse...
Ann Beattie: Frank Turaj . . . where to begin? Fiction is so different, but with a real person, you fall into the trap of thinking there must be some likely place to begin describing him. I can't hide by writing, "Frank Turaj left late because of the rain." (If I did, he'd immediately understand that I was already off track, but beginning an allusion to Hemingway - and "A Farewell to Arms" in particular.) If Turaj hadn't taught me to read, I don't imagine I would have become a writer. And he did it so slyly, so seemingly off-handedly, so graciously. It was also clear from the glint in his eye and from the way he opened a book and from the way he moved around the classroom that he loved literature. He loved some things so much, he was open to hearing any ridiculous comment a student, including me, might make about them-just for the sheer joy of opening a discussion. He's a brilliant teacher, and he also has a swell sense of humor. When I'm wondering if something I've written is too subtle, an internal voice asks, "Would Turaj get this?" and if the answer is yes, then the rest of 'em should become better readers. I was really lucky to have him as a teacher and am luckier, still, that he's my friend.
Folio: You have been an incredibly prolific writer in these past thirty years. Have you ever experienced a dry spell? What brought you out of it? What keeps you doing it?
Ann Beattie: I'm not even sure what constitutes a dry spell for writing, because I'm as adept as other writers at finding things to do as an excuse not to write. Say, gathering together papers for my accountant to do my taxes. He might not think I do a great job, but I really try. Writers will do most anything in order to avoid writing. I think the pressure has to build, and you can't pretend: water that's not boiling makes lousy tea. That said, when I threw out over 300 pages of a novel I'd started twice, you wouldn't have wanted to be living with me.
