Pam Houston is the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness,
Waltzing the Cat, and A Little More About Me. She has just
completed her first stage play, Tracking the Pleiades, and is at work
on a novel, Sighthound.
Pam Houston:Your writing style seems ideally suited
to the short story form, and yet you have also given
some care to the creation of the book as a whole,
the ordering and the relationship between stories.
To my thinking, this form--the book of related short
stories--is the most effective of all, the most organic:
small pieces of the physical world combined into
larger pieces, and those combined, and those combined,
and so on. How early in the writing did you
begin to see the final form this book took? Was it ever
a novel? A collection of unrelated stories? How committed
are you to this form for your future books?
Stephanie Rosenfeld: I, too, like the form of related short
stories, and I did even before I wrote my own book of related
short stories. I agree--the form feels a lot like life, to
me: pieces of the world organizing and reorganizing themselves,
and since they're all pieces of my world, naturally,
they end up related. Of course, there are different degrees of
relationship--in this book, the links between the stories are
pretty clear and spelled out. But I also appreciate books where
the links are harder to follow, or intermittent. That's probably
the writer in me: I like finding the small, sometimes almost
hidden, references to a previous story, the reworkings
of a theme, the view of something from a different angle; I
like wondering why the author revisited the moment--that
seems like art to me--the worrying of something till you've
gotten it right, or understood it, or looked at it enough times.
Or maybe it's obsessiveness--either way, I like it: I like seeing
it, I like doing it. Oh, and I also like books of unlinked stories.
And I like collections where some of the stories link
and some don't--I especially like those. Because then, I have
to read really carefully to find out what's what. Not that I
don't always read really carefully.
The writing of this book took place over a number of
years--about eight, I think, from the time the first story was
written to the time the last was--and I didn't see the final
form of the book till very late in its writing. In fact, I wasn't
writing a book, really: I was writing individual stories, and
when I had a lot of them, I started grouping them in different
ways to see which configuration I liked best. There were
a few different books, I think, that could have come out of
the eighteen or so stories I was working with.
So, the book didn't start out as a novel. In fact, when I
was writing the stories, they weren't related at all, in my
mind, except for one set, made up of "The Last Known
Thing," "Exactly the Size of Life," and "Insects in Amber."
Those three stories had the only recurring characters in them,
and in fact, "The Last Known Thing," and "Exactly the Size
of Life," started out as one long story, but then I decided
they were really two separate "chapters" in the story of the
relationship of these characters; and the third came along a
little later.
I don't know why I didn't approach all the stories as related
in the first place. I mean, if you had asked me during
the creation of any of them, "Who is this woman you're
writing about?" my answer would have been something like,
"Me. Sort of. Or someone a lot like me, who has a life a lot
like mine." But somehow, that never feels like the point.
Like, you're not thinking, "Oh, I'm so interesting I just have
to write a book all about me!" You're using the fiction as
a way to explore things you want to understand or . . .
whatever. That's what I do, anyway. Perhaps the desire to
create characters outside of yourself is linked to the not-understanding--
the process of finding the understanding.
Maybe if you start with something you think you know,
you're smudging your clean slate. Even the first person narrators,
who are clearly the most "me," I never thought of as
all the same person.
The decision to link the stories was made after I put the
collection together. It was pointed out to me by different
readers that the narrator's voice, for the most part, was
consistent throughout the stories, to the point of making
them wonder if it was supposed to be the same character in
each story. And while I liked the book the way I originally
had it--it felt to me like the different sets of characters, and
their different worlds, represented different places along a
continuum--I ended up deciding that linking the stories by
using just one set of characters would also make sense. I didn't
have to change much at all--I just tightened up the chronological
details, mostly. As to whether I'll use this form again
in another book--I don't know. I bet I won't--I think that if
I conceived of a book of stories as linked, it would likely
turn into a novel by the time it was finished, anyway. Or,
one of those books of short stories that functions as a novel,
like Susan Minot's Monkeys.
PH: One of the characters I am most interested in is
Sarah. The book opens and closes with her. She may
be the only real love interest (other than Katrin, of
course) that Abby actually has. The jacket blurb calls
her a childhood friend, but that's far less complicated
and interesting than all the things she actually is. I get
in all the worst trouble in my life because I seem to
need to have a minimum of two intense relationships
in my life all the time, with at least one person of
each sex. Can you tell me about the relationship between
Sarah and Abby? Do you think she needs a
Sarah in her life because she is so bad at choosing
men, or vice versa, or is it even more complicated
than that?
SR: We all need a Sarah in our life, but how many of us, as
adults, make the time and the space required to cultivate and
sustain such friendships? How many of us women set aside
such friendships temporarily, and sometimes permanently, for
more "important" things, like boyfriends, lovers, husbands,
children, jobs, moves? How many of us saw, in time to appreciate
it, the value to all that "invisible" stuff that happens between
girlfriends in adolescence? The value of the time sitting
around doing nothing--earring inventory, fingernail repair,
giggling, talking--while we waited for real life to happen?
Those are some of the things I think about when I write
about the relationship between Abby and Sarah. I say "think,"
present tense, because I'm not sure I'm done with these characters,
or, at least, with the subject. I'm not sure I got it,
completely. Or maybe I just like the idea of inhabiting that
world, if only in my head.
Sarah is a few different things in the book. In the early
stories, Sarah is both the good, supportive friend she appears
to be, and more, too: Abby thinks of her as an alter-
ego, sometimes--someone whose strengths she can draw
upon, since she doesn't possess them herself. In these stories
("Good for the Frog," especially), I liked, as I wrote, the
idea that Abby needs Sarah's friendship so much--that she
needs Sarah to check in with her all the time, that she needs
her guidance, especially, to help her parse the painful and
discouraging--or should that be discouraging and painful?--
experience of her relationships with men. I liked the idea of
two friends practically sharing a skin, and this is a thinly disguised,
wistful fantasy of mine: I would like a friend like that.
I had friends like that, once. Then I grew up. Maybe this reveals
something wrong about me--a maturity deficiency or
something. But it seemed, at the time, like a big bite, having
to leave girlhood. It still does: It was a good place. I liked it
there.
PH: The state of Utah seems to produce an astonishing
number of good writers. Some that grew up there,
some who live there currently, some who spent some
chunk of time passing through. What is your history
with Utah, and what do you think it is about Utah that
drives one to write so well?
SR: I agree about Utah producing good writers, and I've been
racking my brain, but except for joke answers, I can't think of
a reason why that would be. Do you have any theories?
My history with Utah is: My family moved here when I
was ten years old, because my father got a job teaching film-making
at the University. I lived here until I was eighteen
years old, then went to Connecticut for college. After college
I moved to Massachusetts, where I stayed for fifteen years,
missing Utah all the while. Or maybe it was the West I
missed--a place that doesn't exist, really, the way I knew it,
anymore. Utah's a strange place to be from. Or, to be from-but-
not-really-from. It's easy to have a love-hate relationship
with Utah, especially the day after election day, which is when
I'm writing this.
But anyway, I moved back here four and a half years ago.
I'm still trying to decide whether that was a good idea or
not. I like Utah fine, actually. I like it just about as much as I
like any other place.
I'm not sure how living in Utah informs my writing, or
doesn't. Well, on a literal level it does--Utah shows up in
most of the stories. "Inversion" is pretty directly about, in
part, the permanent damage growth has done to this place--
the chipping away at its soul by our unbridled pursuit of our
"quality of life," which, here, seems to mean, as far as I can
tell, "my freedom to do whatever I want wherever and
whenever I want to do it," and usually involves the use of a
gargantuan vehicle (or firearm). I saw someone pull into the
grocery store parking lot in a Humvee the other day, on a
voluntary no-drive day, which we have here when the air
pollution levels get too high. But maybe they were on a military
mission.
But getting back to how Utah informs my writing--
many of the stories in the collection involve traveling, a
sense of never being either here or there, of nostalgia or
longing, which maybe has to do with being from a place I
can never fully commit to.
PH:You write beautifully about motherhood, and, because
Abby and I seem to have so much in common,
the stories that feature Katrin give me pause about
all my intelligent decisions not to have a child. How
would you describe the relationship in your life between
motherhood and writing? In what ways do they
inform one another? In what ways are they simply
worlds apart?
SR: Questions about motherhood are so hard. I mean,
mostly I just feel like a female person with a child. So, yes, I
am a mother, and astonishingly to me, people sometimes say
I'm a good one, though I figure the jury's out on that till my
daughter's at least about thirty. For me, motherhood is just
one of the facts about my state of being--by that I think I
mean something like: Any big, abstract notions, beliefs, or
feelings about being a mother have somehow passed me
by. Like, I didn't glow when I was pregnant; I was not
transformed (except into a crazed, bellowing animal) by
the moment of birth; I didn't feel the widely reported, instant,
magical, life-altering, never-before-experienced surge
of mother-love; I didn't much enjoy being the mother of an
infant; I have pretty much always taken motherhood moment-by-
moment, and often failed to keep hold of the big picture
(that I am glad to be a mother, and love my child).
One thing I should interrupt myself to say here is that
my experience of being a mother and a writer has been perhaps
not-typical, in that I have always gotten pretty much total
support in both areas--first, from my ex-husband, who
was a great, totally involved father and domestic partner from
the beginning; and later from my current partner, who went
from being a bachelor with nothing but a container of take-out
rice in his fridge, to being able to put dinner on the table
five days a week if need be, and who encouraged me to take
time off working for money to write, and supported me
when I did. Not that you can't be a mother and writer if you
don't have this, but, needless to say, it makes it so much easier
if you do.
In answer to your question about the relationship in
my life between motherhood and writing--well, one thing
about my life as a parent (I think this is typical) is that it is
always changing. Thus, so does the relationship between
motherhood and writing. Right now, with a thirteen-year
old, motherhood and writing are two very compatible
activities--two things I do, at different times in the day, that I
can keep comfortably separate from each other, and that each
have room to sort of have their own "life." But there have
been times, as you'd expect, that the two elements of my life
were more at war with each other. The time aspect is maybe
the most obvious difficulty--when children are younger, they
need more constant attention; their school hours are often
shorter; everything needs your facilitation. But for me, the
"mental space" factor was the biggest frustration. Children
are like the cat who always lies down on the newspaper as
soon as you start to read--they always know where your attention
is, and, naturally, want to be right in the middle of it.
Basically, once I decided that, for me, being a good mother
was incompatible with trying to have any thoughts of my
own, I became a lot happier. I'm not talking about in a big,
permanent way--like I just decided to check out mentally for
seven years. I'm talking about in a very specific way, about
compartmentalizing the two activities so that each gets your
full attention when you're engaged in it. So, I disciplined
myself, when I was "on duty" as a mother, if I felt a tantalizing,
creative thought coming on, to shut it out. To jot it down
on a Post-it and save it for later, when I could take it up to
my study and be alone with it. Artificial, I know, but it
works for me. I've heard about people who write novels in
the living room with their kids running around their feet--
that's awesome. But it would never happen to me.
The flip side to this, by the way, is that when I'm on
"writing duty," I've disciplined myself to ignore domestic
concerns, whenever possible. Like, if I notice a big field of
dustballs on my way through a room and have the urge to
sweep them up, I resist: I tell myself, right now I'm working,
and my work is writing, not cleaning house. If it's my day to
cook but I didn't get to the store the day before, I call my
partner at work and tell him he has to do it. I keep the ringer
on the phone turned off when I work, even if it's a hard day
writing and I would actually prefer to be chatting on the
phone or going out for coffee with those friends and acquaintances
who still really don't believe that I actually work
during the day.
But I've gotten off track. The ways motherhood and
writing inform one another: First of all, motherhood has
taught me discipline for writing, pretty much in the ways
I've been describing above. No, I can't just float around having
all the time and space in the world to follow my thoughts
wherever they want to lead me; on the other hand, I've
learned how to use the time I have. I know the exact value,
to me, of an hour, and how not to waste it. I don't have time
to get blocked.
Another way motherhood and writing interact, for me:
Motherhood alleviates some of the loneliness of the writing
life. It just makes you, obviously, have to come out of yourself
at regular intervals. It makes you have to see, and talk to,
at least one other human being a day; it makes you have to
get dressed. I'm very aware of this aspect of it because my
daughter goes away all summer every summer to be with her
dad in Massachusetts, and then I have a hard time maintaining
a healthy balance of writing and living.
Sometimes motherhood gives me good material for my
writing, like in the last passage of "To Sarah, Wherever You
Are." Those words just came out of my daughter's mouth,
exactly like that. Does motherhood enhance my understanding
of the world, or human behavior? Maybe. Motherhood
has probably made me a slightly more tolerant person. Maybe
those things inform my writing. And does writing inform
motherhood? Again, I can't say. My daughter will probably
have some opinions about it in twenty years or so. My
mother's a writer, by the way. And either she kept that part
of her life pretty separate, or, being typically self-absorbed, I
ignored this essential fact about her. I always sensed something
kept her at a remove from the rest of us, though--that
she had something "bigger" than family life to turn to, ultimately.
Uh-oh.
PH:Tell me about the decision to tell the story "Bing-Bing
and Bong-Bong" from the guys' point of view.
Taking the title into consideration, it feels a bit like a
lawyer who decides to let a witness indict himself. Or
am I being too cynical?
SR: Well, I didn't write "Bing-Bing and Bong-Bong" to be
nasty, or for revenge, or even to tell "my side of it." (I hope I
did that in "Insects in Amber.") And I hope to God that the
character I tried to make sympathetic turned out at least a little
bit that way. The way "Bing-Bing and Bong-Bong" happened
was that I had written lengthily, in the cycle of stories about
Stephen, basically on the subject of "How could he do this to
me??!!" And in the end, even after I had pretty much wrung
every emotion out of myself, I still didn't really understand.
This story was my attempt at looking from another angle, using
a more intellectual approach--trying to imagine myself
inside the brain that produced the bizarre thinking. As such,
it's probably all wrong, yet I managed to come up with something
I liked, that at least explained the outward events--the
things I observed and heard about and had said to me--in a
way that made sense. I liked writing the story. I liked the intellectual
puzzle of trying to work it all out. And I like the
voices.
I think I actually did try, very briefly, to write this story
from a female observer's point of view. But that didn't work
at all--probably a better writer than me would have known
without even trying that it wouldn't work. Because what
goes on in a guy's head seems so completely alien and impenetrable
from the outside. I had to get in there and look
around. I had to try to speak out of that voice, that I was so
familiar with the sound of. I thought maybe if I did, the
logic of the actions would come to me.
PH: What rivers have you run, and how did you like
them?
SR: First, let me clarify: Though "running rivers" might be
the correct terminology, I don't want to mislead anyone into
thinking that I did anything but sit on a boat drinking soda
and pointing out rocks, while someone else rowed. For the
other side of the experience, everybody should read your
fantastic river stories, if they haven't already.
I've been down the San Juan a bunch of times, and the
Green--once through Lodore Canyon, and three or four
times through the Desolation/Gray Canyon section. How
did I like them? Well, they are fantastic places, as you know.
What's most striking to me, each time, is the contrast between
places like that, and the world as most of us know it.
It's disconcerting--it feels wrong, when you're at the bottom
of a quiet river canyon, that we live so far from such essential,
sensible things: rocks, sky, quiet, empty time.
PH: I have been, and perhaps you have been, criticized
for staying too close to home in your fiction, that your
narrator, Abby, too closely resembles yourself. I was
once on a panel with Sherman Alexie, who said that in
his culture you can only keep telling your own stories
because if you steal someone else's stories it is like
stealing their car or their cow. I've always felt that so
much happens to me almost every single day that feels
like "story material" I'd never run out of it, and my
process is so centered in observation, I wouldn't know
how to tell "someone else's" story? What is your take
on all this? And what are your plans for the subject
matter of Book Two?
SR: You know, this is a hard question for me to answer--it
usually sends me off in a pretty polemical direction. Why?
Well, I guess I think the criticism about "telling your own
story," especially if that story is "ordinary"--small, interior,
domestic, personal--is more a question of audience than it is
about the work. I know that I very much enjoy reading sto-ries
that take place largely inside someone's brain that render
small details and almost invisible-to-the-outside-world experiences,
that chart or illuminate a narrator's weird obsessions,
or the minute details of their everyday lives. I am a good au-
dience for that work. Not everyone is, and to them I'd say,
and I think this is my big answer to your question: Go read
something else. Why do you care if someone's making work
you don't prefer?
What I really think is that this insistence on some sort of
objective standard, this nervousness about people making work
outside of your understanding or your taste or your tradition
is a way of trying to keep different voices marginalized.
Not to get going on the male/female thing, for example,
but I spent three hideous years in a graduate art program listening
to the ninety-eight-percent male faculty say things to
the female students like, "The trouble with you girls is you're
just painting your mental problems," and "Is this too personal?"
And my favorite: "But is it significant?" (You have to
make a pained face when you say that.)
And I've felt the same thing at work in the world of
writing, though I, myself, haven't been criticized extensively
for it, yet: If you're a woman (and please insert your own
marginalized group, if it applies), you shouldn't be writing
about "just" your own experience of being, because it's not
a big enough, interesting enough, significant enough, art-worthy
enough subject. But I think there are many very
good writers, very major writers, who write from a point of
view that closely resembles their own, or about characters
who resemble them and who inhabit a world resembling
theirs. And who even sometimes keep writing about the
same characters, the same themes, the same literal and figurative
landscapes, over and over again, right?
I have to backtrack slightly here and say, I made the connection
between women and autobiographical work, but I
realize, of course, there are women writing all different kinds
of things, writers whose work doesn't come in for the same
kind of criticism you're talking about--so maybe the question
I should be answering is: Is autobiographical writing
somehow not as valid; is it worth less than other kinds of
writing?
My answer is no, and I don't really have any reason besides,
"I like it," which you're never supposed to say. (I learned
that in art school, too.) Sometimes, as in any other kind of
art, the writer doesn't hit the mark, then the work might
be boring, or embarrassing, or exasperating, or--yes--too
personal, meaning, perhaps, that I can't figure out any reason
why I should want to know any of it, just like having a
bad cocktail-party conversation, but I wouldn't say autobiographical
fiction is any more prone to that kind of failure
than other kinds.
All that said, I wouldn't say that I have more of a commitment
to autobiographical writing than to other kinds. It's
just what's come out, so far. Yes, the stories in What About the
Love Part? all came very directly from my experience. Except
for two of them, which readers should be able to pick out
pretty easily; and even in one of those, the feelings of the
story--the emotional place from which I wrote about events
that never happened to me--were within my own experience,
and were, in fact, the story I wanted to tell.
As to "telling someone else's story," I do agree--if your
process is centered in observation, it becomes very hard to
render authentically someone else's experience. Unless you
can imagine seeing out of someone else's eyes, making your
way to someone else's insights. Personally, when I try to do it,
one of two things happens: Either the screen sort of goes
blank, or the imagined "other" person turns pretty quickly
into someone who sounds and thinks suspiciously like me.
Perhaps one factor in this is how much emotion you call
upon to produce your work--maybe a more intellectual approach
to calling forth a story would be more conducive to
writing outside your own experience. I don't know: I'm
working on it. I do think--well I know--that I have lots to
learn as a writer, and the way I do that is to keep trying to do
things I don't know how to do, but I have to say, so far, inventing
characters and situations far from my own knowl-edge
and experience hasn't grabbed me, except in a sort of
removed, technical way. Which, of course, shows in the final
product.
Book Two, by the way, is already written--it's a novel
called Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu, and it's told from
the point of view of a twelve-year-old girl who's dragged
across the country, along with her little sister, by their wack-job
mother, and who's called upon to try and figure out
what to do as their lives becomes an increasingly scary mess.
None of which ever happened to me. So, yes, in this book, I
was definitely writing "someone else's story." But in some
way, all of it was completely familiar to me as I wrote, even
though almost everything in the book is made-up. It was no
stretch for me at all, after I found the main character's voice,
to slip into the psyche of a twelve-year-old girl and stay
there indefinitely, and because of that, this book feels just as
autobiographical as anything else I've written.
PH: Something that Joy Williams says about writing
always comes back to me on those days when I am
avoiding the computer, and it is that "when writers
write, it is always three o'clock in the morning, it is
always two or three or four o'clock in the morning
in their heads." Do you like writing? Are you happy
when you are writing? Do you have to trick yourself
into sitting down at the computer (as I do), or is it a
place you look forward to spending time?
SR: My feelings about writing kind of mystify me: I am always
aware that being able to write is a great privilege. I'm
glad to be a writer for work and not something else. I'm
happy having something to work on, as opposed to being
greatly relieved when it's finished. I look forward to writing.
Yet when I go to do it, more often than not, it's torturous.
Minute-by-minute, sheer, unmitigated pain and humiliation.
Which makes no sense to me.
Maybe I'll answer your questions by sharing some sample
entries from my writing journals from the last ten years.
If you got ahold of these and didn't know better, you'd
think I was describing the most awful job in the whole
world.
"Trying to write with freedom, being overwhelmed by fear. It is
absolutely torturous right now. What I'm writing's so sh--y. I have
nothing to say, laboring to say nothing. I want to give up."
"Despair and paralysis. The sense of pouring energy into the
void. It is so hard sometimes to keep doing this every day."
"Sad, panicky, distracted. I don't know what my agent is talking
about. I can't write."
"Rejections all over the place. I feel like a big loser."
"Struggling to find the courage to write today."
"Aargh."
But there are some bright spots, too:
"Wrote three pages yesterday. Every minute torturous yet not
necessarily unproductive."
"Yesterday was a hard, hard day. (Was going to add another
'hard,' but it wasn't that bad.)"
In answer to "Is it hard to sit down at the computer?":
"Have finally hauled my a-- up to my study to work. At this
point, just the act of coming in here creates a kind of aversion reaction
in me . . ."
"Having risen late and procrastinated every way possible, including
(a new low) putting my hair up in two braids."
And here's one that sums it all up, I think: "I love to write,
and it is so f------ hard!"
By the way, have we mentioned that this is a self-absorbed
profession?
PH: How long has having a book published been a
dream of yours? What was your fantasy of what would
happen if you made it happen? And now that it has
happened, can you identify any ways your life is different
now? What dreams are still on your list, in terms
of the writing, and in other areas? (I, for instance, very
much want to be fluent in French, to go to Mongolia,
and to have a stage play produced at a fairly major
theater.)
SR: I think this question sort of dovetails with the last: My
fantasy of what would happen, if I had a book published, was
mostly that I could calm down a little, inside--that it would
alleviate the torture of always having to seek legitimacy, permission
to write. I thought that a lot, actually, in the ten-year-
road to getting my first book published: If only I had
permission to do this, it would be so much easier. Meaning
permission from myself, to let go of constant self-doubt.
("Should I be doing this? Does anyone besides me think my
writing is worth anything? Should I just get a 'real' job, and
at least try to contribute something to society, or make some
money, or something?")
The other part of the fantasy was financial, and familiar
to most writers: I fantasized I would make some money
at writing and thus be able to continue having the time to
write.
Oh, and freedom. Not financial freedom--I'm a long
way from that, but I hoped that publishing a book would
give me the freedom to work on other projects. I don't actually
know what those are, yet--this is assuming I ever have
another idea again, after having just finished my novel. But
if you have legitimacy, credentials, a track record, an agent,
certain goals might not be the complete long shots, or require
the same immense effort starting at square one, that
they do when you're just starting out.
The main way my life is different now than before I had
books published is that I don't have to wake up every single
day and proclaim, "Today I'm a writer, but only because I say
I am." I feel a little more confident and powerful and just all
right, now, and that's worth a lot.
I can't comment in too much detail on my list of
dreams, because it would reveal what a thoroughly ordinary
person I am. It's embarrassing. They're things like: Spend
time out in the world. Listen to more music. Knit something
big. Oh--I'd like to figure out a way to incorporate visual
art-making back into my life.