An Interview with Douglas W. Milliken

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Author Douglas W. Milliken, who contributed his story “Thirteenth Apostle’s Star” to Baobab Press’s This Side of the Divide: Stories of the American West, discusses craft, beginnings, and living as a professional writer. “Thirteenth Apostle’s Star” along with several other excellent stories appear in Douglas’s second book, The Blue of the World, from Tailwinds Press. His first book, To Sleep as Animals, was published by Publication Studio/PS Hudson.

Milliken’s stories demonstrate an impeccable eye for the slightly askew and uncanny in and of images, objects, and people. Written in accessible yet exultant prose these stories are studies in rendering emotion through detail and tone. This work is an immersive experience, startlingly subtle, deftly-crafted .

The Author, Douglas W. Milliken (photo by E. Dittenhoefer)

Baobab Press: Douglas, your connection with landscape is apparent, so much that it becomes a character. How did you land on this approach to fiction? Do you think this approach lends itself to the beauty of your prose?

Douglas W. Milliken: I grew up in a very remote part of northern Maine, in the last house on a dead-end road far from the nearest town, so a lot of my time was spent solo, usually wandering around in the woods and fallow pastures behind the house or reading in the cemetery down the road. In a sense, that spread of acreage was my most consistent companion. There was a ghostliness to the overgrowth and wind and rolling shoulders of the ground underfoot. Somehow, in all that abounding solitude, that ghostliness made me feel less alone.

When I was eleven or twelve, I finally got glasses (despite having lobbied for and known I needed them for years) and I remember, driving home with my mom from the optometrist wearing my big chunky coke-bottles for the first time, realizing that I could actually see the individual leaves on the trees, that the vibrant world surrounding wasn’t just a green blur below a blue blur but in fact was dizzying with richness. I’d become so used to my near blindness that I’d forgotten how the world persisted in detail when it was beyond arm’s reach. It was such a rush of way too much. My life up to that point revolved around spending time out in the woods, yet with the pedestrian suddenness of slipping on a pair of glasses, I was confronted with the dropkick epiphany of just how much I’d been missing.

BP: To Sleep as Animals takes place in Nevada. Did you find it difficult to write about this landscape?

DWM: Not at all. The summer I spent in Reno was the first time I’d ever really been outside the Northeast, and while it was immediately evident how extreme the landscape was (I mean, even the thistles were next level), it was equally evident how teeming and varied the place was and how nearly none of that resembled the world from which I’d come. I really couldn’t help but fall in love with it, memorize it as best I could. I hope I’ve done it justice in my writing.

BP: Many of your stories are akin to legends or tales through their otherworldliness. What effect do you want this dream quality to have on the reader? Why present the world this way?

DWM: I think people are a lot more accepting of unlikely phenomena than the movies suggest. I’ve never known anyone to go running and screaming down the street because they think their house is haunted. But I know a ton of people who very casually believe ghosts are responsible for things they can’t explain (or angels or demons or whatever). Because the brain is always trying to make sense of the sensory input it receives: it wants there to be a cogent whole to what we experience. So we adapt to the weirdness, incorporate it into our understanding of reality (or we deny it: denial is wicked popular). In that sense, a minor hallucination of a muppet in the kitchen actually sits quite comfortably next to the flies circling the ceiling fan or the bottle of Cholula on the table.

All that said, I have variously and purposefully throughout my life entered into that same general strangeness, primarily through sleep deprivation or interrupting my sleep cycle with the explicit intention of altering my conscious state. It was in fact the entire spring before flying out to Reno that I dove deep into personal sleep disturbance, waking myself from REM sleep three or four times in the few hours I allowed myself to rest, all in order to keep a dream journal for a class. I’ve also (less fun, less purposeful) been lead-poisoned as an adult, which turns out to have very similar psychological results (I’m amazed I can coherently string together even the simplest sentence). But regardless of how I got there, that waking-dream reality is something I’ve very much experienced, so I guess it stands to reason I would write about it with an air of casual plausibility.

Whether my characters are working through something surreal or banal, though, my end goal is the same: to depict as accurately and honestly as possible what it feels like to be this person, living this life, surviving these things. So if the character is unalarmed by and accepting of the muppet in the kitchen, man, who am I to say that’s weird? The scene’s got to be described with equivalent acceptance and calm.

BP: What did you read when you became a reader? When you were getting into writing? Is it dramatically different from what you read now?

DWM: The first book I read on my own was about seven (apparently identical) brothers who each had a special invulnerability. One could not be smothered, another could not drown, another could not be hanged, and so on down the line. The story begins with one brother being wrongfully accused of murder (he should actually have been tried for manslaughter) and sentenced to death by hanging, but on the day of the execution, the brother who can’t be hanged stands in for the original and, of course, survives. So then it’s execution by fire or by smothering or whatever, and with each attempted execution, a different brother stands in to save the life of the original criminal brother. I can’t remember how the story ends except that none of the brothers die (I guess the townspeople got tired and gave up). But I think it’s telling that, at four years old, I was already drawn to stories about death, punishment, and identity.

I was in 6th grade, though, when writing became a concrete and conscious act. Throughout my childhood I was writing stories or constructing narratives around my drawings of demons and monsters or whatever, but it wasn’t until Mrs. Thurston started assigning writing projects—like really encouraging us to come up with our own stories—that I first recognized the joy I found in storytelling. At the time, I was reading Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s fantasy cycles, Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels, and a ton of Stephen King—although Carlos Casteneda and The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda were somehow also part of the mix—so those early stories bounced around a lot between the grotesque and the mystical, space operas and psychedelic psychopaths and that sort of thing.

Which, to an extent, I really do miss (the stuff I read, I mean, not the stuff I wrote). I still enjoy the genres, but have found way more enjoyment recently in watching those stories as opposed to reading them (few things are as comforting as the warm familiarity of Captain Picard’s command to make it so). Now and then I’ll attempt writing within a genre, but the resultant stories are always perversions far afield of classic sci-fi or horror. Which is fine: I don’t think I’d find much joy in writing a by-the-books fantasy novel (although it’d be dope to just once, with authority and just cause, have a dragon appear in a story). As much fun as that stuff is, I love the work I’m making now, informed as much by Joan Didion and Denis Johnson as Hanne Darboven and Busdriver. If writing the weird existential nightmares I write means I have to spend more of my time reading Werner Herzog describing Werner Herzog, it’s a price I’m willing to pay. 

BP: When/where do you think you started to write in earnest/ became a writer?

DWM: There’s not really a single ah-ha moment so much as many notices and reminders that this is what I love and I’m capable of doing it better. Mrs. Thurston’s language arts class, as I mentioned, made me aware of the satisfaction of rendering a vivid, textual world. My semester-long experiment in sleep deprivation coincided neatly with a tremendous surge in productivity, but that could just as easily (and perhaps more rightly) be attributed to finally having a community of supportive, driven artists to engage with: it’s when I found friends who were actively doing art that I stopped talking about being a writer and really started to work. The time I spent immersed in the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies’ writing program definitely marked a new level of dedication, as did the winter after my mother died when—with nothing else to do but grieve and get lonely—I drafted To Sleep as Animals in six breathless weeks. And so on. It’s like leveling-up in a video game. I reach a certain aptitude in my work and practice, then an event comes along that tells me, “you could be doing this harder, you know.” Each of those events is when I become a writer again.

BP: What do you do for a living and how does this vocation align with, help, and/or hinder your goals as a writer? What are your goals as a writer and for your writing?

DWM: After having spent most of my twenties wrecking my body in one trade or another, I’ve finally cobbled together a system wherein I work the apple harvest each fall, pick up freelance editorial gigs here and there throughout the year, and spend the rest of my time writing and engaging in all the consequent business of being a professional writer (which is to say, sending out countless emails and every now and then getting high off giving a reading). So obviously some years are better than others, but between having inexpensive vices, a small amount of money saved or inherited, and a partner who is okay with (and better at) being the breadwinner, everything somehow remains above water. At least for the time being.

Working the apple harvest kinda began as a stop-gap between other seasonal jobs and attending artist residencies. But after my first season in the orchard, I started selling stories and traveling to give readings more consistently, so the harvest became an opportunity to give myself a few months’ break from being a writer and let someone else be the boss, allow my mind to wander while my body did the work. But I’m not sure that’s how it’s really worked out. Some years, fall is when I have the most opportunity to give readings or when a new chapbook is published. Sometimes the apple harvest is slim, which means I end the season with less cash than I’d hoped. And sometimes winter arrives and I feel totally disconnected from the work I’d been doing earlier that summer. But I love being in the orchard—by the time October gets crisp, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be—so I guess it’s worth it. (I think it’s worth noting that all the stories in the collection that somehow involve apples—like “Saltwater Baldwin” or “Blue of the World”—were written before I began working in orchards.)

As far as goals, man, I just want to have my stories read and not have to work for some [expletive deleted]. I’m very aware that what I do is not for everybody, but when a piece clicks with someone and they share that with me, their reaction is affirmation enough to keep doing whatever it is I’m doing. In another time or place, maybe I’d have been a rabbi or a shaman or whatever other vocation there is whose aim is to reach toward the ineffable and in the process connect with another human, share in that ineffability. Although maybe that’s just communication, what any one of us are attempting at any given moment. Just struggling to connect with another human being. No wonder it’s such lonely work.

An Interview with Dorene O’Brien

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Dorene O’Brien is a Detroit-based writer and teacher whose stories have won the Red Rock Review Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Prize, and the Wind Fiction Prize. Baobab Press is honored to publish her latest short story collection this February, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, which considers the infinitely powerful, and equally naïve and damning force that is human hope. We recently asked Dorene to share a behind-the-scenes look at her writing process, inspiration, and creative horizons.

Baobab Press: Many of the characters in this collection grapple with depression, anxiety, and feelings of isolation. But despite their darkness, these stories are deeply funny. How do you tend to think about the ways that humor and darkness work together in your fiction?

Dorene O’Brien: I think my stories reflect life in all of its darkness and absurdity. My grandmother used to say that when offered a shit sandwich you either laugh or cry, and she chose to laugh. My characters are offered lots of shit sandwiches but, like we all do, they often use humor to cope with the latest event that threatens to break them. I don’t set out to write humorous stories (except for “Eight Blind Dates Later,” which I knew would be a comedy as whenever your mother sets you up on eight blind dates you must laugh through the tears). But bleakness and gravity should be balanced with humor not only to keep readers tuned in to a tough message but to keep them entertained.

BP: What draws you to the short-story form? What do you think it can accomplish that the novel perhaps can’t?

DO: When I was a younger and more impatient writer the short story was something I could “finish” and feel that sense of accomplishment before moving on to the next one to feel it once more. Now I am interested in the form as a challenge in brevity, which demands authors create entire worlds and character histories in a very small space. We must use just the right words while also withholding just the right information so that readers are seduced into colluding with us to make meaning. If the “white space” is as charged with clues as the words printed on the page, the story will emerge in a way that is more gratifying to readers, who have used their insights and perceptions to help craft the tale. There is simply no room in stories for devices used frequently in novels, such as lengthy digressions, false leads, casts of thousands.

BP: Who are some of your most important literary influences?

DO: The first “great novel” I read was Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and it broke open my mind. I was stunned by Twain’s ability to juggle so many literary balls simultaneously: weaving a rich, authentic setting that encapsulated the tumultuous racial history of the country, drawing captivating, sympathetic characters through dialect and arresting backstories, and delivering a confrontational message about a subject that tore the country apart using humor. Twain taught me that fiction more effectively influences people than most other forms. Winning the Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction many years later remains one of my most gratifying achievements. Joyce Carol Oates was an early influence because she is fearless in her style, content and delivery. That is, nothing is taboo; if it happens in life, it can happen in fiction, which is of course a reflection of reality. Andrea Barrett, who was trained as a scientist, was also an early influence who showed me that getting your geek on in fiction is acceptable. I would not likely have written “The Turn of the Wind,” a story seated in crystallography, had I not read her Ship Fever story collection.

BP: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Was there a point in your life when you decided to take your craft seriously?

DO: I started writing—and reading—when I was very young as an escapist activity. My childhood was not an easy one (ask any writer and they will more often than not have grown up in difficult circumstances), so reading about worlds that were like mine made me feel less alone and reading about worlds that were much better gave me hope for something more. But creating my own plots and settings allowed me a form of control I never felt at home, and this was a salvation of sorts. Over the years I collected many notebooks with stories and poems, but this was more therapy than writing. I knew I wanted to be a writer but was afraid to chase that dream as it was the only one I had and if I failed what else was there? In fact, I even majored in journalism so that I could land a “real” job, and when I applied for graduation my advisor said that I had taken so many creative writing classes I was only two away from a second major in English. So I stayed on to double major and continued to write stories without telling anyone, submitting them to small literary journals. I was taking my craft very seriously then, reading and writing voraciously, developing the acumen to determine the difference between a successful and a mediocre story. Slowly the acceptances rolled in, building my confidence to enter contests, which I slowly started to win. I still don’t call myself a writer, a title I’m not sure I’ve yet earned. The apprenticeship is long, and I am still growing and learning.

BP: What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

DO: I just finished reading Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Kate Moore’s Radium Girls. I am watching Black Mirror, the Great British Baking Show and Vikings (I have a Vikings obsession. I once tried to write a serious historical fiction story about the final Viking voyage but the characters took over and turned it into a comedy). I typically listen to classic rock and jazz. I go back to old favorites—Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello—but I also like Radiohead, the Beastie Boys and the Arctic Monkeys.

BP: What’s your writing process like?

DO: I tend to work on two projects simultaneously, staying with one until I hit a wall and then turning to the other; I have fallen into the trap of not writing at all until I had a breakthrough with a stalled work and that is no way to be a writer. I am currently finishing a novel and, while writing it, I finished another story collection! I am more energetic in the evening, so my writing hours are late, though I have started writing during the day as well, something I forced myself to do during a writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I am also interested in many disparate things and so I write about them rather than writing to current trends or contest themes.

BP: Where do you turn for creative inspiration?

DO: Books, because reading riveting literature motivates and teaches me. And my fishbowl. Whenever I have an idea for a story when I’m out and about, I jot it down on scrap paper before the concept flees my ever-filling brain. When I get home, I throw the paper into my fishbowl, which is now about half full (and does not contain fish!). When I need a new story I idea I reach in and grab a paper and am immediately taken back to the moment of the idea’s inception, that original spark reanimating me. Where I do not seek inspiration is from people who tell me that they have a great story idea I should write. Most often their vision is unique to them and only they can relay it. Imagine being responsible for someone else’s brilliant plan! It’s like trying to raise their child as they look over your shoulder.

BP: You also teach creative writing. What are some of the most important things you want to impart on your students, and how has teaching this craft impacted your own work?

DO: Be patient with your ideas, investing the time and effort they need to grow and thrive. New writers have a surplus of concepts so that when one does not flow effortlessly into a story, they ditch it and move on to the next. I encourage them to consider the work required to mold a nebulous thought into a world replete with characters, setting, conflict and resolution that must work together to deliver a message and a full experience to readers. I also encourage them to be kinder to themselves, to quit beating themselves up when the work on the page does not look like the narrative they had envisioned. Thinking and writing are very different things—thoughts arc and snap in our heads, often concurrently, whereas every story is linear, delivered one word at a time. I tell them that I would be shocked if the mental plan and story were the same because evolution occurs naturally in the creation and that this is a good and necessary thing.

My students inspire me every day, so teaching creative writing has augmented my skill and my investment in my own writing.

BP: You identify as a Detroit-based writer. Can you talk about the ways this city has shaped your work and your voice? Do you think it’s important for writers to have a strong connection to place?

DO: My writing, particularly my first story collection, is gritty and was definitely inspired by my experiences in and knowledge of Detroit. “Way Past Taggin’” is about a graffiti artist living and tagging in the city, and it’s a story I could never have written if I lived elsewhere. “Honesty above All Else,” which is in the forthcoming collection, is set in Corktown in Detroit and was inspired by my visits to O’Leary’s Tea Room there before it closed in the 90s. But the story also pays homage to many metropolitan landmarks: Cobo Hall, Tiger Stadium, The Fisher Building, the UA Theater Building, Hudson’s, the Seven Sisters, etc.

I actually don’t think writers need a strong connection to place as it’s our job to imagine landscapes and settings, but I do think place is important in fiction as every story is set somewhere! Even if location is less important than, say, conflict or characterization in a story, readers will be distracted if the smallest allusions to setting feel wrong.

BP: Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re working on now?

DO: I just finished a story collection called A Coterie of Uncommon Women and I am working on the second draft of a hybrid literary/sci-fi novel. Following that will be a story collection focusing on natural and historical oddities, such as the Loch Ness Monster and the Great Red Spot above Jupiter.